John R.G. Has sard 



PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE 



JOHN R. G. HASSARD 




BOSTON 



JAMES II. OSGOOD AND COMPANY 

18S1 



.V\3 



Copyright, 1881, 
By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 



All rights reserved. 



STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED 

BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 

BOSTON. 



PREFACE. 



This little book is made out of letters published 
in " The New York Tribune " in the summer of 
1879. A few paragraphs have been added here 
and there, and other slight changes have been 
made ; but the original matter remains substan- 
tially as it was first written. I did not know, 
until after the last of the letters had appeared in 
print, that the London of Charles Dickens was 
the subject of a small volume published in Eng- 
land a few years ago ; but that a theme has been 
treated once is not always a reason why it ought 
not to be treated again. A writer in " Scribner's 
Monthly " has since gone over the same field, and 
found many fresh and curious things to tell ; and 
the topic is not yet exhausted. It appears to me 
that the record of my random saunterings differs 



4 PREFACE. 

so far from the earlier as well as the later descrip- 
tions, that friends of the Pickwickians and of their 
illustrious successors will perhaps not think this 
republication altogether superfluous. In revising 
the letters, I have made no use of the investiga- 
tions of others, except in one instance duly men- 
tioned in the text. I might have enlarged my 
story if, like the author of the review of Chinese 
Metaphysics in "The Eatanswill Gazette," I 
had read up in handy sources of knowledge, and 
combined my information ; but it seemed better 
that the book should stand as it was, — the tale 
of what any idle traveller may see, with the 
novelist for his guide. 
New Yoke, January, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE : page 

I. Mr. Pickwick 9 

II. The Wellees . .... . . 27 

III. Me. Winkle's Duel. — Rochestee . 51 

IV. Mes. Gamp. — Todgees's . . 69 
V. The Valley of the Shadow of the 

Law 83 

VI. Limehouse Hole 99 

VII. The Jewish Quaetee . . . 113 
A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE . . .133 



I. 

MR. PICKWICK. 



A 

PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE, 



MR. PICKWICK. 



At the Bodleian Library they show you a 
stained and battered volume in the Russian 
language, which the besiegers of Sebastopol 
found among the dreadful ruins of the Redan. 
What must have been the sensations of the 
English officer who brought away this black- 
ened relic, when it was submitted to interpre- 
tation, and discovered to be a translation of 
"The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick 
Club " ? Think of the soldiers of Czar Nich- 
olas sitting clown in the midst of death to 
laugh over Sam Weller. Doubtless they en- 
joyed the book : it seems to have been well- 



10 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

thumbed ; and, if it appealed so strongly to 
them, what wonder that an American in Lon- 
don should be haunted by the spectres of the 
never-to-be-forgotten Club which have made 
the names of London streets, and the very 
aspect of London courts and houses, hardly 
less familiar to us than our own ? To us the 
characters in Dickens's earlier books are liv- 
ing personages. I no more doubted that I 
should discover the footprints of Sam in the 
Borough, and find the very house of Mrs. 
Gamp in Kingsgate Street, than I ques- 
tioned that the ghost of Samuel Pepys made 
"mighty merry" at The Cock over against 
Temple Bar, and Will Waterproof still re- 
peated there his lyrical monologues ; or that, 
when I seated myself on one of the ancient 
wooden benches of The Cheshire Cheese in 
a dark little alley off Fleet Street, I should 
be half conscious of the presence of Oliver 
Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson in their accus- 
tomed corner. 



MR. PICKWICK. 11 

When the guard's horn called me to the 
window one morning, and I saw a bright yel- 
low and black mail-coach roll rapidly across 
Trafalgar Square, I remembered that it was 
on the outside of just such a vehicle, fifty 
years ago, that Mr. Pickwick and his friends 
started, from that very spot, on their mem- 
orable journeys. The real coaching-days of 
course are over, and it was only an amateur's 
turn-out which rattled past Charing Cross 
and down Whitehall ; but, looked at from a 
little distance, the counterfeit was a good 
one, and the -illusion was heightened by the 
circumstance that this was the precise route 
by which the Pickwick Club began their ad- 
venturous excursions. It was there, next to 
the corner of ijae Strand, that Mr. Pickwick, 
as the second chapter of the book relates, 
was assaulted by, the cabman who took him 
for an informer; there the voluble Jingle, 
elbowing his ,way through the crowd, and 
making his first appearance in the story, led 



12 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

Mr. Pickwick into the waiting-room of The 
Golden Cross, and ordered "raw beefsteak 
for the gentleman's eye ; " and there pres- 
ently the whole party mounted to the roof 
of the Rochester coach. The old tavern, if 
not replaced, is at least transformed, and the 
coach-yard with its low archway is no more ; 
but the sign of The Golden Cross Hotel on 
the same site perpetuates the historic asso- 
ciation. 

Having witnessed, as it were, the depart- 
ure of the expedition, it was natural to look 
farther for traces of the Club. It was in 
Goswell Street, as everybody knows, that 
Mr. Pickwick lodged in the house of Mrs. 
Bardell. A roundabout stroll past Furni- 
val's Inn, in whose quiet chambers the first 
pages of " Pickwick " were written, and 
John Westlock long afterwards gave the 
tremendous dinner to Tom Pinch and Ruth ; 
among the secluded groves of Gray's Inn, 
where Mr. Perker had his office up "two 



MR. PICKWICK. 13 

pairs of steep and dirty stairs;" through 
Clerkenwell, where I found in a narrow- 
street, on the edge of the Italian quarter, a 
dismal shop one step below the sidewalk, 
with a stuffed canary in the window, — a 
shop that might pass for that of "Mr. 
Venus, Preserver of Animals and Birds, 
Articulator of Human Bones," only we know 
from Dickens's published letters that the 
original of that establishment, though he 
places it hereabout, was really in another 
part of London, — a stroll through regions 
I had never traversed before, and yet which 
seemed oddly familiar, as if I had beheld 
them in a dream,— brought me at last to the 
street I wanted. 

It is in a part of London where there have 
been many changes. There is a broad and 
bustling thoroughfare — they call it Goswell 
Road now — where Mrs. Bardell once " court- 
ed the retirement and tranquillity of Gos- 
well Street, and placed in her front parlor 



14 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

window a written placard bearing the in- 
scription, ' Apartments furnished for a single 
gentleman.' " A huge block of model lodg- 
ing-houses rears a variegated front of brick 
at the corner where I came out upon the 
road. A horse-railway keeps the neighbor- 
hood noisy. But a little farther on toward 
the heart of the city, the old name of Gos- 
well Street re-appears in some ancient signs ; 
and just before I reached Aldersgate I came 
upon a row of shabby brick buildings, which 
seemed to have been forgotten and left be- 
hind in the march of improvement. They 
are three-story-and-attic houses, with hipped- 
roofs covered with red tiles. The brick, 
once yellow, is black with age and smoke. 
The windows are almost as black as the 
brick. Time and decay have set their mark 
all over the buildings, and I am sure that 
inside we should find creaking furniture and 
stained walls. It is plain that they were 
dwelling-houses originally, but the ground- 



MR. PICKWICK. 15 

floor of each has been turned into a shop. 
Except for this change, and for the accumu- 
lation of fifty years' grime, they must be in 
the same condition as when Mr. Pickwick, 
throwing open his chamber-window at the 
beginning of the novel, looked out upon the 
world beneath. " Goswell Street was at his 
feet, Goswell Street was on his right hand ; 
as far as the eye could reach, Goswell Street 
extended on his left ; and the opposite side 
of Goswell Street was over the way." These 
peculiarities of the situation remain unal- 
tered. I amused myself by selecting one of 
the row as the identical house Dickens must 
have had in his eye when he described the 
lodgings of his hero. There is now a cheese 
and butter shop in the front parlor where 
Mrs. Bardell entertained Mrs. Cluppins and 
Mrs. Sanders at tea ; and an obtrusive sign- 
board, bearing the inscription, u The Little 
Wonder," displays itself over the door. But 
all above that is the same house I have fig- 



16 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

ured to myself ever since I was a boy. Save 
for the intrusion of the shops, I have no 
doubt we should see the identical green door 
and yellow door, which occasioned the dis- 
agreement between Mr. and Mrs. Raddle, 
when, after dashing up splendidly in a cab- 
riolet, "actually making more noise than if 
one had come in one's own carriage," they 
were subjected to the mortification of hav- 
ing their horse led ignominiously by the cab- 
man to a house with a red door, where the 
small round head of Master Tommy Bar dell 
showed itself at the window. 

It would be a short walk from Goswell 
Street to St. Paul's, except for the irresist- 
ible temptations to turn aside. Carthusian 
Street beckons us out of Aldersgate to the 
Charterhouse, whose gray stone cloisters and 
soft green-carpeted courts seem indescribably 
peaceful and beautiful in the midst of the 
surrounding turmoil of trade. The ancient 
school is no longer here ; it has quarters now 



MR. PICKWICK. 17 

in the country : but another school — that of 
the Merchant Tailors — has acquired the old 
buildings. The boys were playing at ball 
when I looked into the enclosure ; and one 
might almost have fancied that Lovelace and 
Addison, Dick Steele and Sir William Black- 
stone, John Wesley, and Thackeray, and John 
Leech, were all at sport there together. The 
Hospital is unchanged. The Poor Brothers 
in their black gowns were, issuing from the 
cheerless refectory, and straggling across the 
court to their little rooms, as the porter led 
me in. A bent and gray old gentleman was 
pointed out to me as one who had been a 
brave officer, gazetted on many fields ; and I 
thought it must be Col. Newcome. The 
labyrinthine alleys of Cloth Fair and Bar- 
tholomew Close are only a few steps from 
the Charterhouse ; and he who has threaded 
these queer, alluring paths finds himself at 
the gate of Bartholomew Hospital, where 
Betsy Prig practised her profession, and 



18 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

Mr. Jack Hopkins witnessed the remark- 
able incidents in surgery which he described 
for Mr. Pickwick's benefit at Bob Sawyer's 
party. At the back of " Bartlemy's," with 
shady courts between, is Christ's Hospital 
school, where the stone effigy of an exceed- 
ingly prim royal personage holds up a warn- 
ing sceptre over the bare-headed blue-coat 
boys. When I passed around by the New- 
gate-street entrance, some of the lads, in 
their dreadful costume, were pacing the 
covered walks, and a loud-voiced function- 
ary — I have an impression that he wore 
many buttons, but perhaps it was only his 
manner that conveyed the sense of buttons 
— was replying with great 'asperity to the 
questions of a visitor. There is a much 
prettier view of the school from another 
side. Through a stout iron railing one 
looks upon a shady quadrangle : the tall 
stone buildings around it are stained in huge 
patches, as if the smoke-laden London fogs 



MR. PICKWICK. 19 

of three hundred years, becoming condensed 
under the eaves and lintels, had dripped 
down the facade. There I found boys at 
play, with their blue gowns tucked up about 
their leather belts, and their yellow legs 
at liberty. You get this sight of Christ's 
Hospital from Little Britain, a narrow 
street which beguiles the confiding way- 
farer out of his road by bending at a 
right angle, like an L, — a freak to which 
London streets are much addicted. In 
Little Britain Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer in 
" Great Expectations," had his offices, and 
with the aid of his clerk, Wemmick, bullied 
his felonious clients : and there were always 
disreputable persons waiting in Bartholomew 
Close to speak to the great police-court ad- 
vocate as he passed. Long before the time 
of Jaggers, Washington Irving made the 
name of Little Britain dear to us ; but the 
characteristics which gave such a quaint 
distinction to the street in his day have 



20 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

vanished, and it is commonplace now and 
commercial. By Little Britain, after much 
devious rambling, I got back to Aldersgate, 
and so found my way, past the Post-office, 
and the corner of Paternoster Row, into 
Cheapside and the Poultry, and Lombard 
Street, the chief resort of financiers. 

On the left of this highly respectable street 
is a square gateway, cut through an imposing 
modern building. It might have been made 
for a carriage-entrance, but carriages never 
use it. Busy men were hurrying in and out, 
and the polished granite columns of some 
palace of commerce were visible in the court 
within. Over the gateway is a small sign, 
inscribed " George Yard." 

It can hardly be necessary to remind the 
student of Dickens that in George Yard, 
Lombard Street, stood The George and Vul- 
ture Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick and Sam, 
during the greater part of the time covered 
by the narrative of their adventures, found 



MR. PICKWICK. 21 

" very good, old-fashioned, comfortable quar- 
ters." I did not expect to see a trace of the 
old tavern, but I went in. The coach-yard 
has been turned into a clean, narrow, paved 
court. The new stone buildings which lift 
their tall fronts around it remind you of 
Wall Street. Hostler and boots and trim 
chambermaid have given place to brokers 
and insurance-clerks. But off at the farthest 
end of the yard, so crowded and elbowed by 
expensive offices that only a fragment of it 
— the breadth of one window — peeps around 
the corner of an alley, is a house of more 
modest aspect, upon which I read the half- 
effaced sign of The George and Vulture 
Tavern. The part that is visible from the 
court seems to have been renewed, or stuc- 
coed ; but, passing around to the other side, 
I found blackened brick walls and old-fash- 
ioned windows, which the historian of the 
Pickwick Club may well have had in his 
mind when he sketched the tavern. The 



22 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

ground-floor has been much changed. The 
coffee-room, enlarged by the outgrowth of an 
excrescence like a Fulton-Market coffee-stall, 
is now a chop-house of the slam-bang variety, 
with fresh oak wainscoting and a general 
flavor of newness. On one side was a huge 
broiling-range, with a cook in white cap and 
apron ; opposite the door, in a little enclosed 
bar, stood a buxom landlady, attended b}' an 
imp of a pot-boy. In a corner was an open 
window with a wooden barrier in front of it ; 
and here, into some invisible bin, the frantic 
waiters tossed the unconsumed fragments 
before they " chucked " the dirty plates to 
the scullion. I sat opposite a commercial 
gent who was shovelling peas, and ate my 
chop from a platter of tinned iron. This was 
more like the eating-house patronized by Mr. 
Guppy and Young Smallweed than the quiet 
tavern of an earlier time ; yet I found no 
great difficulty in restoring — to my own 
satisfaction — the features of the original 



MR. PICKWICK. 23 

inn, and imagining that it was up the stair- 
case which now leads right into the eating- 
room that the sheriff's officer forced his way 
past Sam Weller on the morning when Mr. 
Pickwick was taken from The George and 
Vulture to the Fleet ; and in a room overhead 
that the merry party, including the newly 
married Mr. and Mrs. Winkle, sat down to 
dinner on the evening of Mr. Pickwick's 
release from prison. It is possible that I was 
quite wrong in all my fancies ; but I left the 
tavern with such a lively sense of the reality 
of the novelist's characters that I was not 
in the least surprised when I saw, in large 
letters over the door of a decorous place of 
business, at No. 1 Fenchurch Street, the sign, 

" DOMBEY AND SON." 



II. 

THE WELLERS. 



THE WELLERS. 27 



II. 

THE WELLERS. 

" The Borough " is the name commonly 
given in Mr. Pickwick's time to that part of 
London which lies on the, south or Surrey 
side of the Thames, opposite the heart of 
" The City ; " and the Borough High Street, 
which begins at the Surrey end of London 
Bridge, has been for centuries the great road 
to the southern counties. Along this high- 
way the Canterbury Pilgrims travelled to the 
shrine of Thomas a Becket. The Tabard 
Inn, around whose plenteous table they as- 
sembled before starting on their journey, 
stood until 1676, and then, being destroyed 
by fire, was replaced by an exact counterpart, 
which was not wholly demolished until 1873. 



28 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

The venerable name is still borne by a 
degenerate drinking-shop which now affronts 
the eye on one of the High-street corners. 
Over the pavement of the High Street rum- 
ble all day long the loaded country wagons. 
The air is heavy with the perfume of hops. 
The shops and taverns are furnished forth 
for the accommodation of farmers and car- 
riers, and a queerly mixed flavor of town 
and country is diffused through the whole 
region. 

It has been a district of taverns for more 
than five hundred years; and some of the 
antique inns, dirty, decayed, and fallen from 
their pristine rank, still show the location 
and copy the general aspect of the houses of 
entertainment in whose enclosed yards plays 
were acted in Shakespeare's time. None of 
the buildings actually existing now is much 
more than two hundred years old, but many 
of them are close reproductions of their hoary 
predecessors. There are four or five within 



THE WELLERS. 29 

half a mile of London Bridge, picturesque 
and rambling hostelries of the pattern of The 
Tabard, with timber galleries running around 
two or three sides of a rough-paved court. 
The George Inn, which certainly existed in 
1554, and nobody knows how much earlier, 
was rebuilt according to its original plan 
after the fire of 1676, and is still venerable 
in spite of shabbiness and poverty. The 
front towards the street — or rather the en- 
trance, for at present the houses of this kind 
have no fronts — is entirely changed ; but the 
inner court presents its original appearance. 
The King's Head is an inn of the same class. 
A smart building of yellow stone was going 
up before it when I was there, with an alley 
r mining back to the old tavern. Passing 
through this rather forbidding tunnel, I found 
on the right, as I issued into the rear court, 
a long range of irregular buildings containing 
the coffee-room of the inn, and beyond that 
" The King's Head Tap," the appearance of 



30 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

which stoutly contradicted the promise of 
" comfortable beds " inscribed upon its front. 
Although it was July, a fire was blazing in 
the dark tap-room. Several countrymen were 
in there drinking ; and a spruce young man 
was coming out in haste, wiping his mouth. 
The galleries characteristic of this class of 
house are built of very heavy timbers at The 
King's Head, and are closed in with lattices. 

But the most famous of the old inns in 
the Borough is The White Hart. Shake- 
speare mentions ■" The White Hart in South- 
wark " (" Henry VI. ") as the abode of Jack 
Cade ; and, although that house was burned 
in the last quarter of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, it was promptly rebuilt in the same 
style ; and the present structure, looking 
pretty hale at the age of two hundred, is the 
legitimate representative of the ancient estab- 
lishment. When Mr. Alfred Jingle ran away 
with Miss Rachael Wardle, he took that 
unsuspecting lady to the Borough, because it 



THE WELLERS. 31 

was " the last place in the world " that her 
pursuing brother would think of looking in ; 
and the tavern which he selected was "no 
less celebrated a one than The White Hart." 
It was in the yard of this inn, already in Mr. 
Pickwick's day " degenerated into little more 
than the abiding and booking place of coun- 
try wagons," that we were first introduced 
to Mr., Samuel Weller, who stood at the foot 
of the gallery steps polishing a row of boots, 
when Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Wardle, and Mr. 
Perker arrived there in search of the fugi- 
tives. A little way beyond The King's 
Head, in the midst of new or modernized 
shops, I found an entrance to this queer 
place. A lantern overhead bore the sign of 
The Old White Hart. Picking my way 
down the muddy passage, I saw before me 
almost the very scene which the pencil of 
Phiz drew for us so many years ago. On 
the right-hand side of the court, in a brick 
building, dingy but modern, the tavern ap- 



32 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

peared to be doing a fair business. A printed 
placard announcing that the establishment 
would soon be sold at auction, boasted of its 
valuable country custom, its situation, and 
its old repute. The clumsy wooden galleries, 
in two tiers, are still to be seen on the left- 
hand side of the court, and across the end 
opposite the entrance, with the doors and 
windows of the old bed-chambers opening 
into them, and staircases communicating 
with the yard. Apparently they are no 
longer connected with the tavern, but are 
used for separate tenements. A slatternly 
woman leaned over the heavy balustrade, 
just where I thought " the bustling landlady 
of The White Hart " ought to have been 
calling to Sam Weller to " clean them shoes 
for Number Seventeen directly." A loaded 
country wagon stood in the court exactly as 
in the familiar picture. A dirty lane, where 
an old man was pretending to do something 
with a hoe to a quantity of black mud, gave 



THE WELLERS. 33 

approach to the stables in the rear. Some 
buildings there had recently been demol- 
ished, but accommodation enough seemed to 
have been left. An empty stage-coach was 
drawn out in the yard, and the stamping of 
horses was heard in the stalls. The rooms 
under the side-gallery have been turned into 
a bacon-curing establishment. A cordial per- 
son, of horsey appearance, who was about 
stepping into a light two-wheel cart, after 
some refreshment at the bar, remarked to 
me that curing bacon was very dry work, 
and that I could not do better than go in 
and look at the process. I pondered for a 
moment upon the bearings of these two 
observations ; but, not quite apprehending 
how they were connected with each other, 
I let the opportunity slip. 

Ax> The White Hart Inn, Mr. Samuel 
Weller gave Mr. Jingle the remarkable ac- 
count of the customs of Doctors' Commons, 
where his eminent parent was inveigled by 



34 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

one of the "two porters as touts for licenses" 
into taking out a permit from the Archbishop 
of Canterbury to marry the widow Susan 
Clarke, of The Markis o' Granby, Dorking. 
Naturally, when I left the inn I turned 
toward St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, in 
the midst of shops and warehouses, I found 
the low archway which Sam described. Noth- 
ing about it is changed. There, as in the 
time of Pickwick, still sit just within the 
entrance the historic "touters." I almost 
laughed aloud when a " cove in a white 
apron " touched his hat as I walked in, say- 
ing, " License, sir, license ? " and, in spite of 
my answer that I had no need of such a 
document, seemed disposed to argue with me 
that I really ought to have one. Very sober 
and old-fashioned offices they are all around ; 
and one of the most sombre of them is that 
appropriated to the Vicar-General of the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, a modest inscrip- 
tion on the door-post intimating that a Mr. 



THE WELLERS. 35 

John Hassard is the official in charge. Quiet 
broods over the drowsy little enclosure. The 
rattle of carts and omnibuses in the great 
thoroughfare outside reaches Doctors' Com- 
mons as a subdued hum ; I could hear the 
pattering of a gentle rain; and all the soft 
and various sounds were blended in harmony 
with the voices of choir-boys practising in a 
neighboring building. I passed out through 
a gateway opposite that by, which I entered; 
a second " touter " in a white apron (there 
were two of them at Doctors' Commons, even 
in Jingle's time) renewing the offer of as- 
sistance in the matter of a license with even 
greater cordiality than the first. 

The haunts of the elder Mr. Weller in 
London have not all disappeared. He speaks 
of himself, in one place, as " the celebrated 
Mr. Weller of The Bell Savage." In Belle 
Sauvage Yard you will not find the old 
tavern, the court now being occupied by 
comparatively new buildings, and one whole 



36 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

side given np to the publishing-house of 
Cassell, Petter, & Galpin. Neither does 
Leadenhall Market contain any longer The 
Blue Boar, in whose parlor old Weller as- 
sisted Sam in the composition of his valen- 
tine. But the public house in which the 
elder Weller was first presented to the ac- 
quaintance of a delighted world, I am happy 
to say, still exists. Mr. Pickwick was walk- 
ing up Cheapside after his memorable inter- 
view with Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, when he 
turned to Sam, and asked where he could get 
a glass of brandy-and-water. " Second court 
on the right-hand side," promptly replied 
Sam; "last house but vun on the same side 
the vay. Take the box as stands in the first 
fireplace, 'cos there an't no leg in the middle 
o' the table, wich all the others has, and it's 
wery inconwenient." The house was appar- 
ently under the special patronage of stage- 
coachmen; and among a number of gentle- 
men belonging to that learned profession 



THE WELLERS. 37 

who were drinking and smoking in the 
plainly furnished room, Sam recognized " the 
ancient," otherwise his respected father. 
With Sam's direction, of course I had no 
difficulty in finding the spot. It is up Free- 
man's Court, nearly opposite Bow Church, 
Cheapside (not to be confounded with the 
court of the same name in Cornhill, where 
Dodson & Fogg had their offices), — a dark 
little flagged passage, where a man may stand 
in the middle, and touch the houses on both 
sides; and the last house but one is "The 
Old Burton Coffee House," to which the 
title of " The Silver Grill " has been added 
as an appendix. It is a small and tidy es- 
tablishment, no longer appropriated to stage- 
coachmen — alas! there are but few of those 
interesting persons lingering on this earth — 
but patronized, I should say, by the common 
sort of clerks and shopkeepers. A respecta- 
ble-looking woman was taking a drink at the 
bar when I passed — at half-past ten in the 



38 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

morning. I did not go in : even the privilege 
of " the box as stands in the first fireplace " 
would have been but a hollow mockery, since 
there was no chance of meeting Mr. Weller. 
Another house frequented by Old Weller 
was The Bull, in Whitechapel. It was from 
this inn that he " worked the Ipswich coach ; " 
and in its yard he was presented to us in 
pleasant conversation with Sam, on the morn- 
ing when Mr. Pickwick and his faithful re- 
tainer journeyed down to Ipswich for the 
purpose of exposing the falsehoods of Jingle. 
The broad, unlovely thoroughfare of White- 
chapel begins about half a mile back of the 
Tower, and, stretching "away north-eastward, 
cuts through one of the most squalid quar- 
ters of London. As an old avenue of coun- 
try travel, it abounds with quaint taverns ot 
the ancient coaching-house pattern. The 
Bull has doubtless suffered a great deal from 
the blight of time and the decay of stage- 
coaches. It shows to the street only a nar- 



THE WELLERS. 39 

row front of dark, smoke-stained brick, 
hardly more than a plain house, with a car- 
riage-way to the rear monopolizing the 
ground-floor, a lamp and a sign-board over 
the entrance, and a portrait of the bull just 
inside, where it is too dark to distinguish the 
features of the eminent animal. But if new 
buildings have encroached upon the front, 
the yards within present their traditional 
aspect. They form two complete quadran- 
gles, one opening into the other. In the first 
are to be found on one side the main entrance 
to the inn, the bar, and the coffee-room ; on 
the other, the billiard-room and offices. The 
bed-chambers run all around the upper sto- 
ries. The inner quadrangle, approached like 
the first by a covered opening, is devoted 
principally to the stables. 

" Heads ! " cried Mr. Weller, as the coach 
rattled out of the yard of The Bull, with 
Mr. Pickwick, and Sam, and Mr. Peter Mag- 
nus as outside passengers. They drove up 



40 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

White chapel. At the beginning of the Mile 
End Road an old tavern stands between the 
street and the sidewalk, the carriage-way 
passing on one side of it, the footway on the 
other. This, I suppose, marks the site of the 
old toll-gate, which suggested the elder Well- 
er's philosophical remark to Mr. Pickwick, 
that turnpike-keepers were always men who 
had been disappointed in life : " They shuts 
themselves up in pikes, partly with the view 
of being solitary, and partly to rewenge them- 
selves on mankind by taking toll." Beyond 
that point, in Mr. Pickwick's day, it was 
doubtless a rustic road; but far beyond it 
now extends the crowded district wherein 
poverty and oysters (to cite Sam's observa- 
tion) prevail together : " and the case is the 
same,*' added Weller the elder, "with pickled 
salmon ; " of which delicacy there seems to 
be an enormous street consumption about 
Whitechapel and Mile End to this day. 
Not far from The Bull, a short street on 



THE WELLERS. 41 

the north side of Whitechapel leads into 
Brick Lane, famous for the meeting of the 
Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand 
Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, 
at which Mr. Weller and his son witnessed 
the extraordinary behavior of Brother Stig- 
gins, when that abstemious shepherd charged 
the whole meeting with being drunk, and 
then knocked little Mr. Tadger head first 
down the ladder. 

The place with which the elder Weller is 
most intimately associated in our minds is 
The Marquis of Granby, at Dorking. There 
is still a four-horse coach from London to 
Dorking, as there was fifty years ago, when 
Sam Weller asked leave of absence to go 
down and see his father ; and those who care 
to ride on the modern sham, driven by a 
gentleman in disguise, will find one starting 
from the same White Horse Cellar in Picca- 
dilly where Mr. Guppy met Esther Summer- 
son on her first arrival in London. The 



42 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

distance is about thirty miles, and the road 
lies through one of the prettiest parts of 
Surrey. In a long valley between green and 
shady ridges, on which are fine country 
mansions embowered in trees, the trim and 
thriving little market-town- of Dorking is 
packed along a winding street. On one side 
of the way the houses run up a steep slope ; 
on the other, close lanes lead down to a 
charming mill-stream. The spire of a brand- 
new stone church rises among tiled roofs, 
and contrasts picturesquely with ancient tim- 
bered fronts, whose second stories overhang 
the sidewalk. 

The author of " Pickwick " informs us 
that The Marquis of Granby, over which the 
elder Weller's " second venture " presided, 
was " quite a model of a road-side public 
house of the better class, — just large enough 
to be convenient, and small enough to be 
snug. The bar-window displayed a choice 
collection of geranium plants and a well- 



THE WELLERS. 43 

dusted row of spirit-phials. The open shut- 
ters bore a variety of golden inscriptions 
eulogistic of good beds and neat wines ; and 
the choice group of countrymen and hostlers 
lounging about the stable-door and horse- 
trough afforded presumptive proof of the 
excellent quality of the ale and spirits which 
were sold within." I did not expect to. find 
over any existing hostelry at Dorking, the 
likeness of the Marquis of prranby of glorious 
memory, — u the head and shoulders of a 
gentleman with an apoplectic countenance, 
in a red coat with deep-blue facings, and a 
touch of the same blue over his three-cornered 
hat for a sky." The novelist would not have 
given the real name of a tavern to which he 
assigned such a landlady as Mrs. Weller, and 
such a frequenter as Mr. Stiggins; but I 
was sure, that, under a fictitious or a borrowed 
name, he sketched, as his custom was, an 
actual building. 

I did not know then, what I learned after- 



44 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

wards from an interesting illustrated article 
in " Scribner's Magazine," that Dickens found 
the name of The Marquis of Granby on a 
picturesque old inn at Esher, which has been 
burned down since the article in " Scribner " 
was written. Strolling through the main 
street of Dorking, I no sooner espied a cer- 
tain antiquated tavern before which swung 
the sign of The King's Head, than I ex- 
claimed to myself, " That is Mrs. Weller's 
place ! " and, under pretext of buying a few 
photographs, I went into a bookseller's to 
make inquiries. The shopman did not know 
The Marquis of Granby : " Dear me, sir, I 
could not tell you how many gentlemen have 
asked me that question, just as you are ask- 
ing me now: all the oldest people in the 
town say they never heard of a Marquis of 
Granby in Dorking." But while we were 
talking, I took up a local guide-book, and 
almost the first page that I opened told me 
that my conjecture was correct: The King's 



TIIE WELLERS. 45 

Head was the reputed original of Mrs. Well- 
er's house ; and a little further conversation 
with the bookseller developed the interesting 
fact, that for generations the name of Weller 
has been a well-known one in the neighbor- 
hood. What is still more curious is, that 
the Wellers have mostly been ccachmen, fly- 
drivers, etc. : there is an old Weller in the 
town now, a superannuated postboy of eighty 
years. 

The inn (I shall take leave to call it The 
Marquis of Granby, the name by which I 
am sure we shall all prefer to know it) faces 
a narrow cross street, only a few yards from 
the main thoroughfare. Formerly it must 
have presented a gable-end to the high road ; 
but the corner of the premises has been cut 
off, and the post-office now stands there, oc- 
cupying even a part of the inn itself. The 
old house is of brick; and shabby as it is, 
and crooked and weather-stained, it has 
doubtless been in its day a structure of some 



46 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

gentility: the front is decorated with shal- 
low pilasters ; and the windows, divided into 
three compartments by substantial brick mul- 
lions and glazed with small diamond panes, 
have a beautiful and striking effect. A 
range of irregular buildings, extending some 
distance in the rear, indicates probably the 
situation of the old stable-yard. The door- 
post exhibits a promise of " Good beds ; " and 
the open front door discloses a snug-looking 
bar, shut in by sash partitions, and screened 
by clean white muslin curtains. It was 
within this tempting sanctuary that Mrs. 
Weller sat on one side of the fire, making 
tea, while the red-nosed deputy shepherd sat 
on the other, making toast, when Sam put 
his arm over the half-door of the bar, un- 
bolted it, and walked in, with the salutation, 
"Mother-in-law, how are you?" and by the 
same token the half-door is there yet. The 
horse-trough is gone ; the hostlers have be- 
taken themselves to newer and more thriving 



THE WELLERS. 47 

establishments : but just there at the corner 
must be the spot where Old Weller held the 
deputy shepherd's head under water until he 
was almost suffocated ; and as I stand in the 
High Street, looking at the Marquis of 
Granby, I can almost imagine that I am a 
spectator of the exhilarating scene. It is the 
evening after the funeral of Mrs. Weller. 
The red-nosed man has walked softly into 
the bar, and filled his glass as usual with 
pine-apple rum and water, which the afflicted 
widower has suddenly thrown in his face. 
" Sammy," exclaims the elder Weller, as he 
seizes Stiggins by the collar, and falls to 
kicking him, "put my hat on tight for 
me ; " and then methinks the famous group 
come bursting out of the little door before 
me, the mourning hat-bands of Old Weller 
streaming a yard and a half behind him as 
he comes. ^ 



5t 



III. 

MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. -ROCHESTER. 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. 51 



III. 

MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. —ROCHESTER. 

When Mr. Pickwick, in the fifth chapter 
of the history, " leaned over the balustrades 
of Rochester Bridge, contemplating nature, 
and waiting for breakfast," he looked upon 
very nearly the same beautiful scene which 
is visible from that situation to-day. The 
old stone bridge has been replaced by a 
less picturesque structure of iron; but the 
banks of the Medway still present a rich 
and varied landscape, with cornfields and 
pastures, and the spires of distant churches ; 
the lazy boats still float on the sluggish 
river; and the ancient castle — its towers 
roofless, its massive walls crumbling away — 
still rises in the midst of foliage on the skirt 



52 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

of the citj. It was over Rochester Bridge 
that the coach rattled in the second chapter 
of the book, with the Pickwickians and Mr. 
Jingle on the roof; Mr. Jingle soliloquizing 
volubly about the associations awakened by 
the castle and the old cathedral, both which 
venerable buildings are conspicuous objects 
from the road as one draws near. The rail- 
way-train now leaves the traveller at the end 
of the bridge ; and it is only a few steps from 
the station up the narrow High Street to The 
Bull Inn, where the coach stopped on the 
memorable occasion of the Pickwick Club's 
visit. It was at The Bull Inn that the Pick- 
wickians put up (by Jingle's advice), and 
invited their new acquaintance to dine with 
them that evening. At The Bull, Jingle 
went to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, in- 
censed Dr. Slammer, and provoked the chal- 
lenge to a duel; and from The Bull our 
friends afterwards set out for Dingley Dell, 
Mr. Winkle on horseback, and Mr. Pickwick 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. 53 

driving the chaise. It seems to have been a 
favorite house with Dickens (his own house 
at Gad's Hill was not far away) ; for, besides 
being pleasantly mentioned in Pickwick, it 
is referred to in the recent volumes of Letters, 
in connection with schemes for a frolic with 
sundry of the novelist's intimate companions. 
To this day it remains about as Mr. Pick- 
wick beheld it, — a fine specimen of the 
old-fashioned country tavern, clean, comfort- 
able, cosey, spacious, full of surprising stairs 
and unaccountable corners, and stoutly re- 
sisting the encroachments of improvement. 
It thrusts itself so close to the roadway that 
the passers-by brush against the coffee-room 
windows. There is a wide front of brick, 
without porch or door. Three lamps hang 
over a square carriage-entrance, cut through 
the middle of the house; and a quotation 
from Jingle — " « Good house — nice beds.' 
Vide Pickwick" — is inscribed upon the side- 
posts. Within the passage, on the right, is 



54 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

the entrance to the commercial room and 
smoking-room, as well as to the kitchen ; this 
last-named sanctuary, brilliant with glowing 
coals and rows of shining copper, lying 
well open to view. It was near the close of 
market-day when I arrived: waiters were 
hurrying in and out : chops and rashers of 
ham were sputtering tremendously on the 
gridirons ; bagmen were, displaying their 
wares to country shopkeepers. On the left, 
the upper floors are supported by a row of 
wooden columns ; and at the back of the por- 
tico thus formed is a snug enclosure of glass, 
through which lies the approach to the coffee- 
room and bar. At the rear of the carriage- 
way is the quadrangular stable-yard, with 
ranges of odd buildings around it. Vehicles 
of all sorts, from the smart mail-coach to the 
little two-wheel cart, were drawn under the 
sheds ; and hostlers and big dogs were bus- 
tling about the court. Among the columns 
on the coffee-room side, hung a tempting array 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL.— ROCHESTER. 55 

of hams, grouse, and ribs of beef ; and through 
this grove of good things my companion and 
I reached the vestibule, where a smiling land- 
lady gave us a pleasant welcome. A glass 
cupboard displayed shelves filled with pol- 
ished plate and pewter. A show-window 
exhibited rounds of roast beef, legs of lamb, 
cold fowls, and hanging nets of eggs and 
lemons. Beside it was the entrance to the 
public bar, fragrant with spice and spirits; 
and there were glimpses of the landlady's 
cheerful bar-parlor in the distance. A broad 
old-fashioned staircase, whose bare boards 
were as white as much scrubbing could make 
them, was decorated with a very gallery of 
art, in which the portrait of Charles Dickens 
held a conspicuous place. The Duke of Well- 
ington, the Death of Nelson, a stuffed terrier, 
a fleet of six impossible ships in a perfectly 
inconceivable indigo sea, a collection of 
highly-colored Turks and other picturesque 
Orientals, the skeleton of a monkey, and a 



56 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

colossal bust of Samuel Hahnemann, were 
among the treasures disposed upon the walls 
and landings. So intricate are the passages, 
so absurd and inconsequential the chamber- 
galleries and crooked nights of stairs, that I 
repeatedly lost the way between my bed- 
room and sitting-room, although one was 
almost directly over the other. 

I never thought of the incidents connected 
with the visit of The Pickwickians to The 
Bull as being imaginary. Making no doubt 
that an actual Jingle did go to a ball there, 
in the coat of an actual Winkle, I naturally 
assumed that there was a ball-room ; and- 
therefore, having despatched a comfortable 
dinner, I requested the waiter to conduct us 
to that apartment — much as I might have 
asked leave at the Deanery of Westminster 
to see the Jerusalem Chamber. It occurred 
to me afterwards, that it was perhaps un- 
usual for a gentleman and his wife to go to 
a strange hotel, on a stormy evening, and, 



MB. WINKLE'S DUEL,— ROCHESTER. 57 

without even the scrape of a fiddle, to ask 
abruptly for the ball-room, as if it were as 
much a matter of course as the bootjack. 
But the waiter did not seem to be at all 
astonished : an English waiter is never aston- 
ished unless you insist upon ordering a din- 
ner without " a bit of fried sole ; " and we 
were duly shown to the very room in which 
Jingle paid such court to the little widow, 
and roused such fury in the breast of the sur- 
geon of the Ninety-seventh. It is a spacious 
apartment, up one flight of stairs, with a row 
of large windows overlooking the stable-yard ; 
antique in its decorations, with papered and 
wainscoted walls, a ceiling adorned with 
simple geometrical designs, double doors, and 
over them the little gallery, or pen, in which, 
as the historian of the ball mentions, the 
musicians were "securely confined." There 
is a dark ante-room ; and near it arc several 
sitting-rooms, which could be devoted on fes- 
tive occasions to cards and refreshments. At 



58 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

the time of our visit the ante-room was a re- 
ceptacle for lumber, and the ball-room itself 
was in use for the drying of sheets and 
towels. Now and then, however, a ball still 
takes place there ; and I should judge that 
the general aspect of the apartments has not 
been at all changed since the days of Mr. 
Pickwick. Anybody who will consult the 
original print of Dr. Slammer demanding 
Jingle's card on the staircase may see ex- 
actly how the stairs look at this day. 

As the ball led to the duel, so a visit to 
the scene of offence was naturally followed, 
the next morning, by an excursion to the 
field of the hostile meeting. In the face of 
a gale of wind and a pitiless rain, we strug- 
gled up a steep lull and across a sodden field 
to Fort Pitt, which occupies a commanding 
point on the ridge between Chatham and 
Rochester, and is, indeed, the only thing 
which keeps the two towns from running 
together. " If anybody knows to a nicety," 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. 59 

says Dickens in one of his later short stories, 
"where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, 
it is more than I do." I durst not ask the 
serious waiter if he knew the spot where Mr. 
Winkle was to have fought the duel ; but 
fortunately the directions of Dr. Slammer's 
second were too clear to be mistaken. " Turn 
into the field which borders the trench," said 
he to Mr. Winkle; "take the foot-path to 
the left when you arrive at an angle of the 
fortification, and keep straight on." We 
followed these instructions, and found our- 
selves in a rather lonely region of open 
meadow, with a clump of trees in the dis- 
tance ; much less secluded than it was in Mr. 
Winkle's time, for the houses of Chatham 
and Rochester are in full view now, and 
cattle, dogs, and idle boys stray from the 
outskirts across the very field cf gore, yet 
still a spot where two gentlemen might shoot 
at one another after sundown without the 
certainty of interruption. It will always be 



GO A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

a great satisfaction to have seen this historic 
ground, though nothing could have been 
more uncomfortable than our stroll through 
such a wet and windy country. The dripping 
sentry in his box at the fortress-gate looked 
with wonder at persons who came abroad in 
such weather without apparent necessity; 
and even the dispirited cattle seemed to 
watch with surprise my difficulties with the 
umbrella, as we slipped and stumbled along 
the miry path and across the bleak common. 
We passed, on the way back to the inn, the 
poor little Theatre Royal, where Jingle and 
Dismal Jemmy were to act on the morrow of 
the duel ; and then we waited for sunshine 
to see the rest of Rochester. 

The old city is often mentioned in the 
stories of Dickens : sometimes it is described 
by its proper name. In " The Mystery of 
Edwin Drood," it is slightly disguised as 
Cloisterham ; in " Great Expectations," it is 
merely spoken of as " the market-town," 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. Gl 

four miles from the unnamed village on the 
marshes, where Pip lived with Joe Gargery. 
The Christmas story of "The Seven Poor 
Travellers " gives us some admirable views 
of Rochester ; the scene being laid at a chari- 
table institution in the High Street, over 
whose quaint arched door may be read this 
odd inscription : " Richard Watts, Esq., by 
his Will, dated 22 Aug. 1579, founded this 
Charity for Six poor Travellers, who not 
being Rogues, or Phoctoes, May receive 
gratis for one Night, Lodging, Entertainment, 
and Four-pence each." When Dickens wrote 
of it in " Household Words," the charity 
continued to be duly bestowed according to 
the terms of the will, the prescribed number 
of poor travellers never failing to present 
themselves ; and I presume that the six beds 
are still occupied every night. " The silent 
High Street of Rochester," says the same 
story, "is full of gables, with old beams and 
timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly 



62 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

garnished with a queer old clock that projects 
over the pavement out of a grave red-brick 
building, as if Time carried on business there, 
and hung out his sign. Sooth to say, he did 
an active stroke of work in Rochester in the 
old days of the Romans and the Saxons and 
the Normans, and down to the times of King 
John, when the rugged Castle — I will not 
undertake to say how many hundreds of years 
old then — was abandoned to the centuries 
of weather which have so defaced the dark 
apertures in its walls that the ruin looks as 
if the rooks and daws had picked its eyes 
out." 

It was a never-failing amusement to wan- 
der about this deserted stronghold, and walk 
the hardly less sleepy High Street, where 
little shops in which nobody bought any 
thing were as closely packed together as 
if land, in such a centre of commerce, were 
worth fabulous sums per square inch. In 
truth, the shops have the same listless aspect 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. 63 

now which Pip remarked when he noticed 
that " Mr. Pumblechook appeared to con- 
duct his business by looking across the street 
at the saddler, who appeared to transact his 
business by keeping his eye on the coach- 
maker, who appeared to get on in life by 
putting his hands in his pockets and contem- 
plating the baker, who, in his turn, folded 
his arms and stared at the grocer, who stocd 
at his door and yawned at the chemist. The 
watchmaker, always poring over a little desk 
with a magnifying-glass at his eye, and always 
inspected by a group in smock-frocks poring 
over him through the glass of his shop- 
window, seemed to be about the only person 
in the High Street whose trade engaged his 
attention." 

The cathedral precincts, reached by a short 
lane and an old gateway, were hardly more 
quiet than this main avenue of the quiet 
city. The " wonderfully quaint row of red 
brick tenements, inhabited by the Minor 



64 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

Canons," slept in the afternoon sunlight. A 
green open space called The Vines was so 
still and desolate that I could hardly realize 
it was, so to speak, the back-yard of the 
town. Close by "the nooks of ruin where 
the old monks once had their refectories and 
gardens, and where the strong walls were 
now pressed into the service of humble sheds 
and stables," a long, substantial, antiquated 
brick manor-house, which had the appear- 
ance of being shut up very tight, and walled 
and barred very carefully against intruders, 
showed a picturesque front among the trees 
and shrubs; but it was lifeless, like every 
thing else in that slumberous region. Life- 
less, yet peopled with the images of familiar 
forms that never existed. For this was the 
Satis House of " Great Expectations," in 
whose upper chambers, closed to the light of 
day, Miss Havisham, faded and yellow, sat 
always in her faded wedding-gown. This, I 
say, was the house described in the novel, for 



MR. WINKLE'S DUEL. — ROCHESTER. 65 

so Mr. Forster's Life of Dickens assures us ; 
but it is really called Restoration House, 
while Satis House is the actual name of an- 
other antiquity of Rochester, the old home of 
the founder of Watts's Charity. In the story 
Miss Havisham's house is pulled down, after 
the death of its wretched mistress and the 
scattering of the other characters grouped 
around it ; but in reality there it still stands. 
I was half tempted to wait a while, and see if 
Mr. Pumblechook would not bring Pip to the 
court-yard gate, and Estella answer their 
ring ; and as I walked back to the inn I was 
a little disappointed at not meeting that 
unlimited miscreant, " Trabb's boy," feigning 
extreme terror at the dignity of Pip's appear- 
ance in the dress of a fine gentleman, and 
staggering out into the High Street, crying 
to the populace, " Hold me ! I'm so fright- 
ened ! " 



IV. 

MRS. GAMP.-TODGERS'S. 



MRS. GAMP. — TODGERS'S. 69 



IV. 

MRS. GAMP.— TODGERS'S. 

Besides The Bull at Rochester and The 
Bull in Whitechapel, there is another Bull 
Inn which makes a prominent figure in one 
of the Dickens novels. It is The Bull in 
Holborn, the tavern in which Mrs. Gamp and 
Betsy Prig, nursing Lewsome, turn and turn 
about, one off, one on, exhibited their re- 
markable system for the management of a 
sick-room. The Bull still displays his im- 
posing picture on the north side of the street, 
as he did that morning when Lewsome, hav- 
ing been thrust into his clothes by the com- 
bined exertions of the two nurses, with his 
boots reversed, the points of his collars in 
his eyes, his buttons fastened awry, the soap 



70 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

in his mouth, his scalp rasped with a stiff 
hair-brush, and Mrs. Gamp's night-bottle, 
" an ingnn or two, and a little tea and sugar " 
in his coat-pockets, was assisted into the 
coach at the door, watched with the keenest 
interest by Mr. Mould the undertaker, as " a 
gentleman likely to suit " him ; while Mr. 
Nadgett, with his pocket-book full of secrets, 
waited in the darkest box of the coffee-room 
for the man who never kept his appointment. 
The home of Mrs. Gamp was net far from 
The Bull. She lodged over the shop of Poll 
Sweedlepipe, easy-shaver and bird-fancier, 
in Kingsgate Street. Holborn in London 
may be compared to the Bowery in New 
York ; and Kingsgate Street, a short and 
shabby passage out of Holborn on the north, 
is in the character of its houses not unlike 
parts of Staunton, Rivington, Second, and 
similar streets, which issue from the east 
side of the Bowery. Anybody who will turn 
to Phiz's picture of Mr. Pecksniff trying to 



MRS. GAMP. — T OD GEES' S. 71 

knock up Mrs. Gamp will see an exact repre- 
sentation of the general aspect of the neigh- 
borhood. Barbers abound in that region. 
The first sign encountered on turning out of 
Holborn is " Easy Shaving, One Penny ; " 
and just beyond it is a more pretentious 
establishment, which holds out the ambigu- 
ous promise, " Gentlemen's Hair Cut and 
Brushed by Machinery." Neither of these 
could be Poll Sweedlepipe's ; but at the other 
end of the street the house may be seen. It 
is a mean and crooked building, only two 
windows wide, with a striped barber's pole, 
a low doorway, and a common little show- 
window, in which are displayed not birds, it 
is true, but a variety of trumpery wares, 
principally gilt brooches and black-headed 
pins, by the sale of which, as well as by 
mending cheap clocks, the successor of Poll 
Sweedlepipe relieves his mind from the strain 
of easy shaving. In the familiar picture a 
rag-dealer is represented as one of Mrs. 



72 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

Gamp's neighbors; and in reality a sign 
across the street announces that the busi- 
ness of a " rag, bottle, and bone merchant " is 
there carried on. By the medium of a print- 
ed bill in a shop-window, at the time of 
my visit, " Messrs. Jones, Nutkins, Vickers, 
and Patrickson begged to announce to their 
numerous friends and the public that they 
intended holding a plain dress ball," with an 
" efficient band " and tickets at sixpence. 
Two young women, somewhat the worse for 
drink, at that moment leaning against a 
lamp-post, and smiling amiably upon a young 
man who was trying to engage them in con- 
versation, were certainly qualified by the 
plainness of their attire to grace that costly 
entertainment. On the window-sill, over 
the easy-shaver's show-window, Mrs. Gamp 
kept a row of flower-pots, by rattling among, 
which with the cabman's whip, Mr. Pecksniff 
finally aroused her ; and there I actually 
beheld a similar row of flower-pots — who 



MRS. GAMP. — TODGERS'S. 73 

knows but the very same? — in the year 
1879. 

As I contemplated this vivid realization of 
a well-remembered picture, I became con- 
scious that the reproduction was completed 
in an unexpected manner. When Mr. Peck- 
sniff began to knock, " every window in the 
street became alive with female heads." 
" He's as pale as a muffin," said one lady. 
" So he ought to be if he's the feeling of a 
man," observed another. I did not inquire 
the occupation of the easy-shaver's present 
lodger, who keeps the flower-pots; but the 
manifestations of interest by the population 
of Kingsgate Street in the movements of the 
stranger who was looking at the shop made 
it seem probable that Mrs. Gamp had left a 
successor to her business at the old stand. 
A stout lady next door showed so much 
anxiety that I hurried away, lest she should 
call out, in the words of her prototypes, 
u Knock at the winder, sir ; knock at the 



74 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

winder. Lord bless you ! don't lose no more 
time than you can help : knock at the 
winder." 

There are not many of the localities in 
" Martin Chuzzlewit " which can be so clearly 
identified as this little barber-shop ; still there 
are several neighborhoods in London whose 
names are inseparably associated in our minds 
with the story. I made a journey to Austin 
Friars, because in that secluded nook myste- 
rious little Mr. Fips had his dark chambers, 
where Tom Pinch called weekly for his salary, 
and tried in vain to learn the name of the 
unknown employer who gave him occupation 
at the Temple. It is a crooked and ghostly 
sort of place, off Broad Street, near the Bank, 
intensely quiet in the very heart of business, 
with narrow alleys and gateways leading into 
it, and at one of the arched entrances an 
ancient sculptured pilaster, relic of the de- 
parted monks from whom the tangle of yards 
and lanes take their name. In the very 



MRS. GAMP. — TODGERS'S. 75 

middle of the place, packed away so tightly 
that nothing of it is left uncovered except 
two aged doors and an odd window or so, is 
a surprising old Dutch church. It was after 
the close of business hours when I sauntered 
into the silent precincts, trying to choose 
among the old-fashioned houses the one that 
I should prefer for the residence of old Mar- 
tin Chuzzlewit's confidential agent and Tom 
Pinch's inscrutable acquaintance. A janitor, 
sweeping a flight of well-worn steps, asked 
me whose chamber I was looking for. " Mr. 
Fips's " was on my tongue ; but I checked 
myself; and answering, " Thank you, I want 
no one," I went out, by another court than 
that which brought me in, to the street called 
London Wall. 

Of the home of old Anthony Chuzzlewit 
and his son Jonas, we are merely told that it 
was in a very narrow street somewhere behind 
the Post-Office ; and of an equally celebrated 
place in the same story, to wit, Todgers's 



76 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

Commercial Boarding-House, the location is 
hardly more clearly defined. We only know 
that it was near the Monument which lifts 
its ridiculous flame-crowned head a few rods 
from London Bridge to commemorate the 
great fire of 1666. " Surely," says the nov- 
elist, "there never was, in any other bor- 
ough, city, or hamlet in the world, such a 
singular sort of a place as Todgers's. And 
surely London, to judge from that part of it 
which hemmed Todgers's round, and hustled 
it, and crushed it, and stuck its brick-and- 
mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from 
it, and stood perpetually between it and the 
light, was worthy of Todgers's, and qualified 
to be on terms of close relationship and alli- 
ance with hundreds and thousands of the odd 
family to which Todgers's belonged." I 
have seen, up besmeared and secluded lanes 
in the City, a great many commercial board- 
ing-houses which answer pretty well to the 
description of that famous abode. They 



MRS. GAMP. — TODGERS 'S. 77 

lurk in blind and forgotten alleys and remote 
courts ; and their proprietors have a singular 
habit of putting up little illegible signs in 
places where nobody can discover them ex- 
cept after persevering search : I came upon 
one of these secret advertisements on the 
inner side of an archway, where it could 
only be seen by a person going away from 
the house. These establishments, however, 
are to be sought now in the neighborhood of 
Fleet Street rather than of London Bridge. 

I walked all about the dingy region near 
Monument Square ; I even climbed to the 
top of the Monument in the hope of looking 
down upon Todgers's roof with its posts and 
fragments of rotten clothes-lines, and, its two 
or three tea-chests with forgotten plants in 
them like old walking-sticks ; and if I failed 
to single out the particular house which was 
graced by the services of Young Bailey and 
honored by the patronage of Mr. Pecksniff, I 
consoled myself by recalling the remark of 



78 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

the author of the story, that nobody ever 
found Todgers's by a verbal direction. " You 
couldn't walk about in Todgers's neighbor- 
hood as you could in any other neighborhood 
— you groped your way for an hour through 
lanes, and by-ways, and court-yards, and pas- 
sages ; and you never once emerged upon any 
thing that might reasonably be called a street. 
A kind of resigned distraction came over the 
stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, 
giving himself up for lost, went in and out 
and round about, and quietly turned back 
again when he came to a dead wall or was 
stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the 
means of escape might possibly present them- 
selves in their own good time, but that to 
anticipate them was hopeless." The truth is, 
whatever the neighborhood may have been 
when the book was written, it is not now so 
utterly bewildering as this extract would lead 
one to suppose. But the narrow thorough- 
fares, the ancient mansions turned into store- 



MRS. GAMP. — TODGERS'S. 



79 



houses, the dark yards, the drowsy offices, 
are still to be found about Pudding and Bo- 
tolph and Love Lanes; and the same flavor 
of musty oranges, which the historian of 
"Martin Chuzzlewit " noticed, still hangs 
about this antique region. Cargoes of " dam- 
aged oranges, with blue and green bruises on 
them," must be festering in the cellars. I 
wandered up and down the steep lanes, and 
never lost the sense of mildewed oranges 
until I came to the river, where Billingsgate 
overpowered all other smells with the fra- 
grance of fish. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OP 
THE LAW. 



THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 83 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF 
THE LAW. 

It was on a showery summer morning that 
I found myself, after much aimless strolling 
through I know not what tangle of absurd 
streets, in Fountain Court of The Temple, 
where dull buildings of blackened brick look 
down upon one of the most charming spots 
in London. The ancient historic chambers 
suggesting dust and cobwebs; the arched 
passages and confusing alleys in which the 
stranger quickly loses the points of the com- 
pass ; the wig and robe maker's shop hiding 
in a dark corner; the venerable Temple 
Church shut in so cosily among the lawyers ; 
the sculptured effigies of departed knights, 
lying cross-legged on the pavement within, 



84 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

and the grave of Oliver Goldsmith in the 
flagged court without; the pretty house of 
the master of The Temple (that is, the 
preacher at The Temple Church) ; the Goth- 
ic Library Hall with its imposing and pictur- 
esque approach ; green terraces ; worn stone 
walks; a broad blooming garden sloping to 
the Thames — these are the chief features in 
a scene of which it seemed to me that the 
visitor could never tire. But I liked no part 
of it better than the little yard around the 
fountain whence, looking down a flight of 
stone steps, the eye rested upon the fresher 
Garden Court beyond. The rain had ceased 
when I came to Fountain Court; the nod- 
ding trees and flowers sparkled in the sun- 
shine ; dancing shadows speckled the trim 
turf ; the fountain played merrily ; a pretty 
young woman tripped across the court ; and 
I wondered if she could really be Ruth Pinch, 
and if John Westlock would not join her. 
For here occurred the dainty love-scenes 



THE SnADOW OF TIIE LAW. 85 

between those two young persons ; here the 
plashing water whispered the secret which 
simple-hearted Tom was so slow to under- 
stand. 

The Temple is crowded with the ghosts of 
fiction. Here were the neglected chambers, 
lumbered with heaps and parcels of books, 
where Tom Pinch was set to work by Mr. 
Fips, and where old Martin Chuzzlewit re- 
vealed himself in due time and knocked Mr. 
Pecksniff into a corner. Here Mr. Mortimer 
Lightwood's dismal office-boy leaned out of 
a dismal window overlooking the dismal 
churchyard ; and here Mortimer and Eugene 
were visited by Mr. Boffin offering a large 
reward for the conviction of the murderer 
of John Harmon ; by that honest water-side 
character Rogue Riderhood, anxious to earn 
" a pot o' money " in the sweat of his brow 
by swearing away the life of Gaffer Hexam ; 
by Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam ; 
by " Mr. Dolls," negotiating for " three 



86 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

penn'orths of rum." It was in Garden Court 
of The Temple, in the house nearest the river, 
that Pip, holding his lamp over the stairs 
one stormy night, saw the returned convict 
climbing up to his rooms to disclose the mys- 
tery of his Great Expectations. Close by the 
gateway from The Temple into Fleet Street, 
and adjoining the site of Temple Bar, is 
Child's ancient banking-house, the original 
of Tellson's Bank in "A Tale of Two Cities." 
The demolition of Temple Bar made neces- 
sary some alterations in the Bank too ; and 
when I was last there the front of the old 
building which so long defied time and change 
was boarded up. 

Chancery Lane opposite The Temple, run- 
ning from Fleet Street to Holborn, — a dis- 
tance only a little greater than that between 
the Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York, — 
is the principal pathway through the " per- 
plexed and troublous valley of the shadow of 
the law." At either end of it there are fresh 



TEE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 87 

green spots; but the lane itself is wholly 
given up to legal dust and darkness. Facing 
it, on the farther side of Holborn, in a posi- 
tion corresponding with that of The Temple 
at the Fleet-street extremity, is Gray's Inn, 
especially attractive to me on account of the 
long grassy enclosure within its innermost 
court, so smooth and bright and well kept 
that I always stopped to gaze longingly at it 
through the railed barrier which shuts stran- 
ge out -as if here were a tennis-lawn 
reserved for the exclusive use of frisky bar- 
risters. At No. 2, Holborn Court, in Gray's 
Inn David Copperfield, on his return from 
abroad near the end of the story, found the 
rooms of that rising young lawyer, Mr. 
Thomas Traddles. There was a great scuf- 
fling and scampering when David knocked at 
the door; for Traddles was at that moment 
playing puss-in-the-corner with Sophy and 
" the girls." Thavies' Inn, on the other side 
of Holborn, a little farther east, is no longer 



88 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

enclosed : it is only a little fragment of shabby 
street which starts, with month wide open, to 
run out of Holborn Circus, and stops short 
after a few rods, without having got any- 
where. The faded houses look as if they 
belonged in East Broadway ; and in one of 
them lived Mrs. Jellyby. Staple Inn, almost 
face to face with Gray's Inn, is a place of a 
very different sort. It is reached from Hol- 
born through a gateway in a row of the 
quaintest and most ancient of crooked and 
heavily-timbered houses,- which turn their ga- 
bles towards the busy street ; and, after pass- 
ing through sundry inconsequential courts, 
one issues from its shady recesses into Chan- 
cery Lane. Hawthorne has written about it ; 
and perhaps it has been oftener and better 
described than any of the other inns except 
The Temple (the oldest of all), and Lincoln's 
Inn whose noble gateway rises, hoary and 
majestic, on the west side of Chancery Lane. 
The buildings within the large enclosure 






THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 89 

of Lincoln's Inn are a strange mixture of 
aged dulness and new splendor ; but the old 
houses and the old court-rooms seem to be 
without exception dark, stuffy, and incon- 
venient. Here were the chambers of Kenge 
and Carboy, and the dirty and disorderly 
offices of Sergeant Snubbin, counsel for the 
defendant in the suit of Bardell against Pick- 
wick. Here the Lord Chancellor sat in the 
heart of the fog, to hear the case of Jarndyce 
and Jarndyce. At the back of the Inn, in 
the shabby-genteel square called Lincoln's 
Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn was murdered 
in his rusty apartment. The story of " Bleak 
House " revolves about Lincoln's Inn. The 
whole neighborhood has an air of nrystery 
and a scent like a stationer's shop. Always 
I found Mr. Guppy there, with a necktie 
much too smart for the rest of his clothes, 
and a bundle of documents tied with red 
tape. Jobling and Young Smallweed some- 
times stopped to talk with him. The doors 



90 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

of the close court-rooms opened now and 
then, and gentlemen in gowns and horsehair 
wigs came out to speak with clients who 
waited under the arches. 

In one of the miserable side streets near 
Chancery Lane I found a wretched house in 
ruins, the front half fallen in, the black floor- 
beams exposed to view, the threshold sunk 
below the sidewalk, planks nailed across the 
windows, a barrier in front to warn passers- 
by that the pile might tumble upon them. 
It was not difficult to associate this spectacle 
with the shop of old Krook, the rag and 
waste-paper dealer, the lodging of little Miss 
Flite, the scene of the death of the mysteri- 
ous law-writer ; but in reality I think the 
" narrow back street, part of some courts 
and lanes immediately outside the wall of the 
Inn," in which the novelist places Krook's 
shop, must have been on the land between 
Lincoln's Inn and the Strand afterwards 
cleared to make room for the new Law 



THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 91 

Courts. The shop of Mr. Snagsby, the law- 
stationer, is said to have been in " Cook's 
Court, Cursitor Street ; " and in Cursitor 
Street on the east of Chancery Lane, as well 
as in an L-shaped and sombre court which 
runs out of it, there is a dense colony of 
stationers and of law-copyists besides ; most 
of the latter class of persons living in hum- 
ble lodgings, where the rickety windows are 
obscured by a thick crust of smoke and dirt. 
But the real name of the alley which runs out 
of Cursitor Street is Took's Court. Cook's 
Court is on the other side of Chancery Lane. 
The noisome alley described in "Bleak 
House "by the name of Tom-All-Alone's has 
its counterpart in a lane which I saw near 
this quarter : the tall houses, leaning over 
towards one another, were kept apart by 
timbers stretched across from front to front ; 
and dirty children upon whom the sun never 
shone sat at the doors with their feet in peren- 
nial mud. 



92 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

The climax of " Bleak House " is the pur- 
suit of Lady Dedlock, and the finding of the 
fugitive, cold and dead, with one arm around 
a rail of the dark little graveyard where 
they buried the law-copyist, "Nemo," and 
where poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at 
night and swept the stones as his last tribute 
to the friend who "was very good" to him. 
There are three striking descriptions of this 
place in the novel. " A hemmed-in church- 
yard, pestiferous and obscene — a beastly 
scrap of ground which a Turk would reject 
as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would 
shudder at. With houses looking on, on 
every side, save where a reeking little tunnel 
of a court gives access to the iron gate — 
with every villany of life in action close on 
death, and every poisonous element of death 
in action close on life ; here they lower our 
dear brother down a foot or two ; here sow 
him in corruption to be raised in corrup- 
tion ; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bed- 



THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 93 

side ; a shameful testimony to future ages 
how civilization and barbarism walked this 
boastful island together." The exact situa- 
tion of the graveyard is not denned in the 
novel; but it was evidently near Lincoln's 
Inn, and Mr. Winter told us, in one of his 
delightful London letters, that it was also 
near Drury Lane. So strangely hidden away 
is it among close and dirty houses, that it was 
only after three long searches through all the 
courts thereabouts that I found the " reeking 
little tunnel," and twice I passed the entrance 
without observing it. Opening out of Drury 
Lane, at the back and side of the theatre, is 
a network of narrow flagged passages built 
up with tall houses. There are rag and 
waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or 
three dreadful little greengrocers' stalls, a 
pawnbroker's, a surprising number of cob- 
blers, and in the core of the place, where the 
alley widens into the semblance of a dwarfed 
court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, 



91 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

clancing-slioes, pasteboard rounds of beef and 
cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play- 
books. Between Marquis Court on the one 
hand, Russell Court on the other, and a mis- 
erable alley called Cross Court which con- 
nects them, is what appears at first sight to 
be a solid block of tenements. The grave- 
yard is in the very heart of this populous 
block. The door of one of the houses stood 
cpen, and through a barred staircase-window 
at the back of the entry I caught a glimpse 
of a patch of grass — a sight so strange in 
this part of London that I went around to 
the other side of the block to examine fur- 
ther. There I found the " reeking little 
tunnel." It is merely a stone-paved passage 
about four feet wide through the ground 
floor of a tenement. House-doors open into 
it. A lamp hangs over the entrance. A 
rusty iron gate closes it at the farther end. 
Here is the "pestiferous and obscene church- 
yard," completely hemmed in by the habita- 



THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 95 

tions of the living. Few of the graves are 
marked, and most of the tombstones remain- 
ing are set up on end against the walls of the 
houses. Perhaps a church stood there once, 
but there is none now. Though burials are 
no longer permitted in this hideous spot, the 
people of the block, when they shut their 
doors at night, shut the dead in with them. 
The dishonoring of the old graves goes on 
briskly. Inside the gate lay various rubbish, 
— a woman's boot, a broken coal-scuttle, the 
foot of a tin candlestick, fragments of paper, 
sticks, bones, straw, — unmentionable abomi- 
nations; and over the dismal scene a reek- 
ing, smoke-laden fog spread darkness and 
moisture. 



VI. 

LIMEHOUSE HOLE. 



LIMEHOUSE HOLE. 99 



VI. 

LIMEHOUSE HOLE. 

There is a part of the Thames below the 
Tower — a stretch of filthy water, in which 
rubbish is forever floating, up and clown with 
the tide in the black shadow of grimy ware- 
houses — where Dickens must have been 
almost as much at home as the nondescript 
semi-marine characters by whom the shores 
are inhabited. It is the region of the 
Docks, between Wapping and the Isle of 
Dogs. On the Surrey side, "near to that 
part of the Thames on which the church at 
Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on 
the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the 
river blackest with the dust of colliers and 
the smoke of close built, low-roofed houses," 



100 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

was once the maze of loathsome buildings 
occupying the mud-bank of Jacob's Island," 
described forty years ago as the scene of the 
death of Bill Sikes in « Oliver Twist." On 
the Middlesex side, a little farther down 
stream, is the slimy and low-lying locality 
called Limehouse Hole. It was from the 
police-station in this quarter that the nov- 
elist often started on his night tours with 
the river police. When Inspector Bucket 
set forth with Esther Summerson to hunt 
Lady Dedlock, they came first to this 
quarter. " A man yet dark and muddy, in 
long, swollen sodden boots, and a hat like 
them, was called out of a boat, and whis- 
pered with Mr. Bucket, who went away 
with him down some slippery steps — as if 
to look at something secret that he had to 
show. They came back, wiping their hands 
upon their coats, after turning over some- 
thing wet." In this quarter again lived 
Rogue Riderhood and Gaffer Hexam. Here 



LIME HO USE HOLE. 101 

occurred the " Harmon murder," which lays 
the foundation for the novel of " Our Mutual 
Friend ; " and here stood The Six Jolly Fel- 
lowship Porters public house, ruled by the 
severe Miss Abbey Potterson. 

I took a steamboat one day at Westminster 
Bridge, and after a voyage of forty minutes 
or so landed near Limehouse Hole, and fol- 
lowed the river streets both east and west. 
It was easy enough to trace the course of 
Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, 
as they walked under the guidance of Rider- 
hood through the stormy night from their 
rooms in The Temple, four miles away, past 
the Tower and the London Decks, and down 
by the slippery water's edge to Limehouse 
Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer 
Hexam's arrest, and found him drowned, 
tied to his own boat. The strictly com- 
mercial aspect of the Dqcks — the London 
Docks above and the West India Docks 
below — shades off by slight degrees into 



102 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

the black misery of the Hole. The ware- 
houses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds ; 
by private wharves, where ships, all hidden, 
as to their hulls, behind walls and close 
fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over 
the narrow roadway ; by lime-yards ; by 
the shops of marine store-dealers and pur- 
veyors to all the wants and follies of sea- 
men; and then by a. variety of strange 
establishments which it would be hard to 
classify. Close by a yard piled up with 
crates and barrels of second-hand bottles, 
was a large brick warehouse devoted to the 
purchase and sale of broken glass. A wagon 
loaded with that commodity stood before the 
door, and men with scoop-shovels were trans- 
ferring the glass into barrels. An enclosure 
of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way 
street, might have been the original of the- 
dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, 
except that Boffin's Bower was several miles 
distant, on the northern outskirt of London. 



LIME HO USE IIOLE. 103 

A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street 
and house rubbish, all called here by the 
general name of " dust," were waiting their 
turn to discharge. There was a mountain 
of this refuse at the end of the yard ; and a 
party of laborers, more or less impeded by 
two very active black hogs, were sifting and 
sorting it. Other mounds, formed from the 
siftings of the first, were visible at the sides. 
There were huge accumulations of broken 
crockery and of scraps of tin and other 
metal, and of bones. There was a quantity 
of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, 
as large as a two-story cottage, of old hoops 
stripped from casks and packing-cases. I 
never understood, until I looked into this 
yard, how there could have been so much 
value in the dust-mounds at Boffin's Bower. 
Gradually the streets became narrower, 
wetter, dirtier, and poorer. Hideous little 
alleys led down to the water's edge where 
the high tide splashed over the stone steps. 



104 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

I turned into several of them, and I always 
found two or three muddy men lounging at 
the bottom ; often a foul and furtive boat 
crept across the field of view. The charac- 
ter of the shops became more and more diffi- 
cult to define. Here a window displayed a 
heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; 
there another set forth an array of trumpery 
glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pre- 
texts, perhaps, for the disguise of a " leaving 
shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's establish- 
ment, out of which I expected to see Miss 
Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up 
her back hair as she came. At a place where 
the houses ceased, and an open space left free 
a prospect of the black and bad-smelling 
river, there was an old factory, disused and 
ruined, like the ancient mill in which Gaffer 
Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the 
fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the 
fire. 

I turned down a muddy alley, where twelve 



LIMEHOUSE nOLE. 105 

or fifteen placards headed Body Found were 
pasted against the wall. They were printed 
forms, filled in with a pen. Mr. Forster tells 
us in his Life of Dickens that it was the, 
sight of bills of this sort which gave the first 
suggestion of " Our Mutual Friend." At 
the end of the alley was a neat brick police- 
station ; stairs led to the water, and several 
trim boats were moored there. Within the 
station I could see an officer quietly busy at 
his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever 
since Dickens described " the Night Inspect- 
or, with a pen and ink and ruler, posting up 
his books in a whitewashed office as studi- 
ously as if he were in a monastery on the 
top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a 
drunken woman were banging herself against 
a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow." 
A handsome young fellow in uniform, who 
locked like a cross between a sailor and a 
constable, came out and asked very civilly if 
he could be of use to me. " Do you know," 



106 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

said I, " where the station was that Dickens 
describes in ' Our Mutual Friend ' ? " 

" Oh, yes, sir ! this is the very spot. It 
was the old building that stood just here : 
this is a new one, but it has been put up in 
the same place." 

"Mr. Dickens often went out with your 
men in the boat, didn't he ? " 

" Yes, sir, many a night in the old times." 

" Do you know the tavern which is de- 
scribed in the same book by the name of the 
Six Jolly Fellowship Porters ? " 

" No, sir, I don't know it ; at least not by 
that name. It may have been pulled down, 
for a lot of warehouses have 'been built along 
here, and the place is very much changed ; 
or it may be one of those below." 

Of course I chose to think that it must be 
"one of those below." I kept on a little 
farther, by the crooked river lanes, where 
public houses were as plentiful as if the entire 
population suffered from a raging and inex- 



LIMEHOUSE HOLE. 107 

tinguishable thirst for beer. The sign-boards 
displayed a preference for the plural which 
seems not to have escaped the observation of 
the novelist. If I did not see The Six Por- 
ters, I came across The Three Mariners, The 
Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three 
Tuns, The Three Foxes, and The Two Brew- 
ers ; and in the last I hope that I found the 
original of the tavern so often mentioned in 
the story. I had first noticed it from the 
steamboat, — "a narrow, lop-sided wooden 
jumble of corpulent windows heaped one 
upon another as you might heap as many 
toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veran- 
da impending over the water," — a tavern 
of dropsical appearance, which had not a 
straight floor in its whole constitution, and 
hardly a straight line. I got at the entrance 
on the land side after a search among puz- 
zling alleys, and there I found still stronger 
reminders of " Our Mutual Friend." Stuck 
against the wall was an array of old and new 



108 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

handbills, headed Drowned, and offering 
rewards for the recovery of bodies. The 
value set upon dead persons in Limehouse 
Hole is not excessive : the customary recom- 
pense for finding them seems to be ten shil- 
lings, and in only one instance did the price 
reach the dazzling amount of one pound. 
By the side of the house is an approach to 
the river : most of the buildings near are old 
and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of 
the shore must be exposed. Giving upon the 
slippery stones, beside which lay a few idle 
and rickety boats, I found the expected range 
of windows with " red curtains matching the 
noses of the regular customers." I looked 
in at the door. A long passage opened a 
vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or whatever it 
may have been, on the river-side ; and per- 
haps I should have seen Miss Abbey Potter- 
son if I had gone to the end. Several water- 
side characters were drinking beer at the 
lead-covered counter, waited upon by a sharp 



LIME no USE nOLE. 



109 



young woman, who seems to have replaced 
Bob Gliddery. Instead of the little room 
called " Cosy " where the Police Inspector 
drank burnt sherry with Lightwood and 
Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled 
« The Club." A party of " regular custom- 
ers," all evidently connected with water (or 
mud), sat around a table : beyond question 
they were Tootle, and Mullins, and Bob 
Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten 
o'clock Miss Abbey would issue from the 
bar-parlor, and send them home. If The Six 
Jolly Fellowship Porters is still extant, this 
must be the house. 



VII. 

THE JEWISH QUARTER. 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 113 



VII. 

THE JEWISH QUARTER. 

The haunts of Fagin were swept away 
long ago ; but we can trace in London 
streets the footsteps of a scarcely less in- 
teresting Hebrew, — I mean Old Riah, the 
venerable Jew of " Our Mutual Friend." 
Anybody who will follow the Thames for 
a quarter of a mile above the Houses of 
Parliament may easily find, near Lambeth 
Bridge, the home of Jenny Wren, the doll's 
dressmaker, at which Old Riah was a favor- 
ite visitor. The little blind square called 
Smith Square, the ugly church in the mid- 
dle of it, with four little corner-towers, like 
some petrified animal lying on its back with 
its four legs in the air, the row of poor and 



114 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

quiet houses where Church Street joins the 
square, the marks of neglect and stagnation 
about the neighborhood, — all these things 
are unchanged. Dickens was an indefati- 
gable pedestrian, and he made his characters 
take tremendous walks. Old Riah trudged 
three miles one evening to reach Jenny 
Wren's house, and then he turned about 
and walked with the lame child to The 
Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, a distance of 
nearly six miles more, through the most dif- 
ficult streets. 

The home of Riah was in the City, on the 
edge of the Jewish quarter of Houndsditch. 
It was in St. Mary Axe, a dull and narrow 
street where the fog was thicker and blacker 
than in any other part of London. A transi- 
tion street, which leads from the substantial 
city merchants to the old-clothes dealers, its 
character seems to be as ill-defined as its 
location ; and I fancied that in a general 
way it suggested bill-discounters. I saw here 



THE JEWISII QUARTER. 115 

several grimy houses, with nondescript count- 
ing-rooms on the ground-floor, any one of 
winch may have been the pattern of the 
establishment of " Pubsey & Co.," where 
Fascination Fledgeby exercised his pecul- 
iar talent for business, and Riah made for 
Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam a garden on 
the roof. Going eastward from Leadenhall 
Street through St. Mary Axe, we find, just 
before reaching Houndsditch, a short and 
dingy passage called Bevis Marks. Here 
lived Sampson Brass ; and at the end of 
the passage, crowded and put out of coun- 
tenance by modern places of business, there 
are some old houses, looking, I doubt not, 
very much as they did when Sampson and 
his sister Sally occupied one of them, and 
the Marchioness and Dick Swiveller played 
cards in the back-kitchen. 

One bright Sunday I passed this way to 
see Rag Fair. On the east side of Hounds- 
ditch, almost opposite St. Mary Axe, is a 



116 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

shallow flagged court, much wider than such 
places commonly are at this crowded end 
of London ; and here lies the entrance to 
one of the most remarkable scenes in the 
metropolis. The solemn quiet of the busi- 
ness quarter began to be disturbed as I 
approached Houndsditch, — once a trench 
into which they cast dead dogs, and now 
a region of very lively Hebrew shopkeepers, 
— by street cries, and the babble of many 
voices, and the bustle of a moving crowd. 
The whole population was abroad. Young 
men with prominent features and conspicu- 
ous satin cravats were letting themselves 
out of the closed warehouses and hurrying 
off to suburban paradises on the Thames for 
a day's outing. Corpulent dames in loose 
calico wrappers, and with hair carefully plas- 
tered about their temples, were gossiping on 
the sidewalk. Young women of the florid 
style displayed their charms for the bene- 
fit of casual clerks from Bishopsgate and 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 117 

loungers from Whitechapel. At the corners 
of the court I have mentioned, there was a 
brilliant display of cheap carpeting disposed 
like bapners, chairs and sofas hung high in 
air, hearth-rugs fluttering in the breeze, and 
red cotton pocket-handkerchiefs spanning 
the roadway in flaming festoons. The move- 
ment of the crowd tended toward this spot ; 
and I soon found myself swept into the 
current. 

At the bottom of the court appeared a 
flight of three or four stone steps, leading up 
to a wide, low, and dingy structure, looking 
like a compromise between a cheap market- 
house and a country railway-station. Across 
the front was the inscription, "Phil's Build- 
ings : Clothes and General Mart ; " and at 
one side was a sign-beard intimating that 
the public could find rest and refreshment 
at the neighboring Montefiore Arms. It is 
through Phil's Buildings that you enter Rag 
Fair. 



118 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

It is said that on a good Sunday you may 
see here, in a network of houses, lanes, and 
alleys, no less than three miles of old clothes. 
I dare say that is true ; but, although I spent 
a great deal of time in Rag Fair, I confess 
that I never had the courage to go to the 
end of it. I found the first building fitted up 
with rough counters, shelves, racks, and trays, 
for the accommodation of various classes of 
dealers. Hundreds of calico dresses dangled 
from aloft, at first sight giving the impression 
that about an acre of the loveliest of Hounds- 
ditch had simultaneously committed suicide. 
Men's coats and trousers were heaped upon 
planks laid across trestles. A mountain of 
old hats rose in one corner ; and in another 
a voluble young Hebrew, with a brush and a 
bottle of blacking, was working, as if for 
dear life, to give a presentable appearance 
to a load of dreadful old shoes, snatched, 
one would say, from the gutters and dust- 
bins. Here, however, was only the begin- 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 119 

hing of the Fair. The building has several 
faces, opening into courts and alleys, all 
crammed with cast-off apparel ; and these 
communicate with other sheds like the first. 
Over their fronts is painted, in large letters, 
" Entrance to the Exhibition: Clothes Ex- 
change. " One portion of the mart is devoted 
to a somewhat fresher class of wares ; cheap 
trinkets, the poorest sort of imitation jewelry, 
the most gorgeous of colored handkerchiefs, 
and so many pairs of suspenders that it would 
seem to be a habit in Houndsditch to have 
all trousers made too big in the waist. The 
articles displayed in this quarter being, so 
to speak, new, and consequently ratable at 
some certain commercial value, were not in 
great request; for the frequenters of Rag 
Fair love the excitement of desperate and 
protracted bargaining, — an intellectual ex- 
ercise only to be enjoyed in its perfection 
when there are no means of determining 
what the goods in dispute are worth, or 



120 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

whether they are worth any thing at all. 
The advent of a possible customer threw 
the whole shed into commotion. A young 
lady with very heavy eyebrows and red 
cheeks, who stood in a bower of prismatic 
handkerchiefs, addressed me in the tone of 
Jenny Wren addressing Fascination Fledge- 
by. " Good-morning, this morning, young 
man," she said ; then, as I did not yield to 
soft persuasion, two muscular mothers in 
Israel tried sterner means, and seizing me, 
one by the coat-tail, the other by the arm, 
began to pull witli all their might. I owed 
my escape, after a short but severe struggle, 
to the lucky accident of divided counsels 
among the adversary ; for, while one tried to 
drag me into shilling cravats, the other put 
forth her strength on behalf of red stockings, 
and between them I got away, and fell" into 
the arms of a male dealer in suspenders. 
"Buy 'em," shouted the man fiercely, shak- 
ing a bundle of them in my face: "why 



TIIE JEWISH QUARTER. 121 

don't you buy 'em ? You aren't frightened 
of 'em, are you ? " A shirt, a military jacket, 
and a pair of red plush small-clothes were 
in turn commended to my attention, as the 
very things I appeared to need. 

The most remarkable part of Rag Fair is 
not the " Clothes Exchange " proper, which 
is held under roofs, but the much more ex- 
tensive, crowded, and bewildering mart in 
the adjoining streets and lanes. Petticoat 
Lane, which lends its name to the whole 
Fair, is called Middlesex Street on recent 
official maps ; but it retains its old designa- 
tion in common use. This is the centre of 
the Sunday traffic. Gravel Court, Sandys 
Row, Tripe Yard, Fryingpan Alley, Partridge 
Court, are some of the other passages, foul 
and narrow, which are given up to this 
curious business. Nearly all the transactions 
are conducted in the dirty open street ; but 
there are many small shops besides, incredibly 
black and vile, in whose dark recesses com- 



122 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

modi ties of some humble sort are kept for 
sale — I certainly cannot say are exhibited. 
Wherever the court is wide enough, an un- 
tidy Jewess sits on the ground amidst heaps 
of goods. A piece of sail-cloth, or a frag- 
ment of an old awning, being spread upon 
the muddy cobble-stones, becomes the sole 
substitute for shop and counter. One dame 
I saw surrounded by odd stockings, which 
she was clamorously offering to the public 
at the rate of "two pair the bob;" another 
was displaying on the cloth around her a 
variety of much-worn dresses, of coarse qual- 
ity but showy pattern, which may have done 
duty in a music-hall of the lowest class ; a 
third was debating with possible purchasers 
the value of sundry second-hand chemises ; 
and a fourth had barricaded herself within 
a double circle of shoes and gaiters, mostly 
cracked at the sides, trodden at the heels, 
leaky at the* soles, and infirm as to fasten- 
ings, but all newly polished. In the piles 



THE JEWISn QUARTER. 123 

of men's clothing, there were scarlet uniform 
coats (shed perhaps by deserters), and livery 
suits, and flowered cretonne waistcoats such 
as are worn by negro minstrels. Buyers were 
not lacking ; and I had not long to wait be- 
fore witnessing the full operation of the sys- 
tem of " Clothes Exchange." Workingmen, 
after animated negotiation, took off ragged 
and dirty coats, and put on others a little 
better. A cripple rested on his crutches, and 
effected an exchange of one old shoe. 

Underclothing, as a rule, seemed to have 
been submitted to a rude sort of doing-up : 
a heap of shirts, offered at eightpence apiece, 
had perhaps been through a mangle, though 
it was long since they had seen a wash-tub ; 
but there was about a barrel-full of soiled 
and crumpled collars just as they had come 
from the necks of the last wearers. I do 
not think the buyers were particular. They 
were exclusively the very poor, but by no 
means exclusively Israelites. Toward noon 



124 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

the alleys became so closely packed, from 
house-wall to house-wall, that movement was 
at times almost impossible, and the matrons 
encamped in the roadway were in immediate 
danger of being trampled upon. Here was 
to be seen the traditional old-clothes-man of 
novels and picture-books, a grim person, with 
long skirts and gray beard, and a bag on his 
back. Here were to be seen dealers, not only 
in old clothes, but in every variety of article, 
which, having been used once, might possibly 
still serve another turn. A basket was filled 
with second-hand sponges — which can hard- 
ly have been nice. On walls and fences hung 
the most amazing collections of old leather 
straps, relics of abandoned trunks, and frag- 
ments of rotten harness. There were scraps 
of leather ; there were bushels of rusty keys ; 
there were stray door-knobs, and odd furni- 
ture-casters, and broken hammer-heads, and 
all the litter of brass and iron rubbish which 
is usuallv found in the bottoms of tool-boxes. 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 125 

There were trays full of old spectacle-cases. 
There was a clothes-basket containing an 
armful of ancient kid and leather gloves, 
mostly not mated. A young man devoted 
himself entirely to the sale of ends of twine, 
done up in hanks at a halfpenny a bunch. 
Artisans' tools of all kinds, in every stage of 
dilapidation, were great articles of trade; 
and thriftless workmen who had secured a 
job for Monday morning came here to supply 
themselves with such poor implements as 
they had the pence to buy. 

With the noise of bargaining and disputing 
mingled the uproar of the venders of drinks 
and delicacies and nostrums, and scores of 
useless conveniences. "Now then, gents," 
shouted a seller of sarsaparilla-wine, "this 
is the true elixir of life, recommended by the 
entire medical faculty of Great Britain, with- 
out exception." "Penny a pot! penny a 
pot!" screamed a parrot-like young Hebrew 
with a basket of nuts. "Hokey-pokey, a 



126 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

penny ! " roared a very large man, taking 
from an ice-cream freezer a little square of 
something which looked like a slice of white 
castile soap. " I'm the only party breathing 
that's got these goods," exclaimed a dealer 
in something utterly undesirable, I have for- 
gotten now what it was. A young man, in 
the uniform of the French infantry of the 
line, mounted a chair, and announced him- 
self, by means of a placard, as " the Parisian 
Electric Light Company," his stock in trade 
being cigar-lights and penny needle-cases. 
A lively person who was endeavoring to 
dispose of a barrow-full of hammers at 
twopence each, drove a purely imaginary 
but tremendous trade with speechless and 
invisible buyers : " You take this one at 
tuppence ; thank you, sir. Here you are. 
Now, then, gents, who's for the next at tup- 
pence, only TWO pence ? They're a-going 
fast ! " He never looked at anybody in par- 
ticular; he never parted with any of his 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 127 

goods ; lie never took in any money, and he 
always held up the same hammer; and I 
rather thought that the nonchalance with 
which he omitted to pretend to believe that 
anybody believed in his little fiction was 
the drollest thing in the Fair. There was 
another young man who stood on a table 
with a vial of water in his hand. "I will 
now proceed," said he, " to fill a bottle, and 
distribute its contents among you ; " where- 
upon he poured the water from one vial 
into another, and without further ceremony 
calmly went on with an irrelevant and per- 
fectly incomprehensible harangue. I was 
his only auditor, and he fortunately did not 
consider it worth while to distribute the con- 
tents of his bottle to me; but later he col- 
lected a crowd, and when I passed that way 
again he was hard at work with his vial of 
water and sundry essences, manufacturing 
spurious ponies of rum and brandy. More 
varieties of mussels and other unpleasant- 



128 A PICKWICKIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

looking shell-fish were exposed for sale than 
I imagined all the British waters contained ; 
and the quantity of these viands consumed 
in Rag Fair seemed to be beyond computa- 
tion. Whole alleys were full of them, dis- 
played on costermongers' barrows. The shell 
being previously removed, the flabby edible 
and its juice were generally kept in a wash- 
basin, whence the vender ladled out penny- 
worths with his dirty hand, and served them 
on small earthenware plates or bits of broken 
china. What with dripping shell-fish and 
bouncing ginger-beer, the alleys were every- 
where slippery. 

The uproar was at its height when I turned 
into a comparatively quiet court to escape the 
confusion. It was one of a series of con- 
nected yards, just on the margin of the Fair, 
shut in by squalid tenements, and communi- 
cating with Houndsditch by narrow and 
crooked passages. Children were swarming 
about the horrible pools, mingled overflow of 



THE JEWISH QUARTER. 129 

the kitchen and washtub, which festered in 
the hollows of the pavement ; and a few feeble 
women sat listless in the doorways, keeping 
house, while the able-bodied members of the 
family were busy at the Fair. These, and 
such as these, were the homes of the mer- 
chants of Petticoat Lane, — only a few rods 
from the Bank of England ; and yet when I 
came out into the Sunday stillness and de- 
corous solidity of Leadenhall Street I felt as 
if I had just got back from a very particu- 
larly dirty and degraded foreign country. 



A BOAT- VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 



The American tourist who lands at Liver- 
pool, hurries through the Rows at Chester, 
does Stratford, Warwick, and Kenilworth in 
the remnant of a day, and then rushes up 
to London, little thinks that the railway is 
whisking him away from one of the most 
beautiful regions in the island of Britain. 
The scenery of the Wye has an old renown ; 
and yet, although it lies only a little to the 
westward of the ordinary route from the 
Mersey to the Thames, few travellers from 
our country know any thing of its enchant- 
ing prospects. In the summer season the 
railway companies advertise cheap rates for 
the " Tour of the Wye ; " and I dare say their 

133 



134 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

excursion tickets are worth what they cost, 
although it must be confessed that the fre- 
quency with which the train plunges into the 
bowels of the mountains, and runs through 
long tunnels, at the most picturesque points 
of the road, is apt to interfere with the trav- 
eller's enjoyment. The proper way to make 
the descent of the Wye is in a row-boat. 
This conveyance may be taken at Hereford, 
whence you can float to the Bristol Channel 
in two easy days. 

Hereford is a shabby and untidy little city ; 
and its ancient cathedral, most villanously 
restored, is not one of the best in England. 
Nevertheless, some hours can be well spent 
in viewing the vaulted aisles, and mutilated 
shrines, and the ruins of chapter-house and 
cloisters; in wondering that a rude and ig- 
norant age should have reared such superb 
works, and a more advanced age should have 
battered and destroyed them; in lounging 
about the streets where antique houses with 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 135 

timbered and carved fronts still look neat 
and sturdy ; and then, after passing through 
a dirty lane where Nell Gwynne was born, 
and a tangle of squalid courts and alleys 
where the name of that celebrity is affec- 
tionate^ displayed upon gates and corners, 
you will come to a bridge over the Wye, and 
see before you a soft landscape. On the left 
hand, a smooth lawn slopes to the water's 
edge, from a brilliant and tree-fringed gar- 
den, and over the foliage appear the gables 
and chimneys of the Episcopal Palace. On 
the right, near a row of pretty cottages, are 
the boats waiting for customers, and I am 
afraid not getting many. Indeed, for twenty 
or twenty-five miles below Hereford, the as- 
pect of the banks — low meadows, through 
which the stream twists itself with many a 
crook and backward bend — is somewhat 
monotonous ; and it is better to take the rail- 
way as far as Ross, and begin the voyage 
there. 



136 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

Mounting the steep slope upon which the 
little town of Ross has disposed itself, and 
passing around the curious old building in 
the market-place, — a town-hall raised aloft 
upon worn pillars of red sandstone, and offer- 
ing shelter under its arches to the venders of 
poultry, pease, and gooseberries, — you will 
find standing side by side on the main street, 
a bookseller's shop and a, chemist's shop, each 
purporting to be the veritable dwelling of 
John Kyrle, celebrated in the third of Pope's 
" Moral Essays " as the " Man of Ross." 

" But all our praises why should lords engross ? 
Rise, honest Muse I and sing the Man of Ross ; 
Pleas'd Vaga echoes through her winding bounds; 
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds." 

In this case both claimants are equally in 
the right ; for the two shops were originally 
one house, and it was there that John Kyrle 
passed some of the most fruitful }^ears of his 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON TEE WYE. 137 

remarkable life. He was not rich ; but out 
of a meagre income he saved enough to 
make great benefactions to the public, not 
by the posthumous and easy charity of a 
will, but while he was alive and had use for 
money : and his memory is held in especial 
reverence because his generosity was so 
highly ennobled by self-sacrifice. His name 
still fills the town. At the top of the hill is 
the public recreation ground which he planted 
for the benefit of his native place ; and next 
to it is the pretty stone church, beautified by 
his liberality, and hallowed by his remains. 
Tombs and statues, more stately than one 
would have looked for in such a little town, 
are placed thick around the chancel ; and in 
the midst of them rise two living trees, — 
tail and thrifty elms, which have thrust them- 
selves through the pavement, and grown up 
inside the church until they nearly touch the 
roof. The townspeople regard them with 
affection, because they are said to be shoots 



138 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE f 

from an avenue (no longer existing) which 
John Kyrle planted in the churchyard. They 
stand just within one of the windows. It 
was a bright and quiet Sunday afternoon 
when I sat in the deserted church to look at 
this pretty spectacle. The casement was 
open ; the branches were dancing in the 
wind ; the light played with the foliage, and 
strange shadows fell upon the effigies of de- 
parted knights and dames stretched upon 
their gray stone monuments, and the life-size 
figure of a cavalier standing erect, a few feet 
from the wall, with his hand upon his shield. 
A broken cross in the churchyard bears the 
significant inscription: "Plague. Ano. Domi., 
1637. Burials 315. Libera nos., Domine." 
A gravestone is " Sacred to the memory of 
Margaret, the wife of William Watkins, late 
chaise-driver at the Swan Inn in this town," 
— from which we may infer that Mr. Wat- 
kins took pride in his profession. Another 
Watkins exclaims, posthumously, — 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 139 

" Farewell, vain world, I have seen enough of the, 
Now I am careless what yon says of me ; 
Your smiles I court not nor frowns I fear ! 
My cares are past my head lies quiet hear," — 

with more of the same sort. But the favor- 
ite epitaph in Ross appears to have been the 
familiar stanza, " Affliction sore long time I 
bore," which is repeated several times. 

The Royal Hotel at Ross stands in a gar- 
den, on the edge of a precipitous hill, so set 
about with walls, turrets, battlements, and 
terraces, that if the masonry were not obvi- 
ously fresh you might suppose it to occupy 
the site of some half-demolished stronghold. 
But the stone-work is intended chiefly to 
strengthen the scarp of the cliff, down which 
the road runs headlong to the river; and it 
has been finished off with a little military 
flourish, merely for the sake of appearances. 
Looking over a low, vine-covered parapet, 
from the pleasant piazza of the hotel, you 
see the shady road below, then a stretch of 



140 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

green bottom land, heights again in the dis- 
tance, and the tortuous Wye hurrying 
through the alluvial valley. From this point 
the windings of the river can be descried for 
several miles. At Ross it makes an enor- 
mous horse-shoe bend around one of the 
most beautiful hayfields imaginable, — a vast 
expanse of perfectly smooth meadow, dotted 
with a few oaks, one of which is supposed 
to be a thousand years old. Not more than 
half a mile away, on the opposite bank, is 
the picturesque little hamlet of Wilton. In 
full view of the hotel are the ivy-clad re- 
mains of Wilton Castle, built in the reign 
of Stephen, and for many generations the 
residence of the Lords Grey de Wilton, but 
a ruin now for more than two hundred years. 
There is a fine stone bridge of the time of 
Elizabeth, with curious sharp bastions, be- 
tween the five arches; and on the bridge 
stands a tall sun-dial bearing a monition 
whose wisdom may excuse its syntax : — 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 141 

" Esteem thy precious time, 
Which pass so quick away ; 
Prepare then for eternity, 
And do not make delay." 

We spent several days at Ross, too much 
charmed with the place to leave it. At last 
the Ross volunteer corps, getting ready for 
the annual encampment, began marching 
about the streets to the tune of " Grand- 
father's Clock ; " and we bade the boatman 
be in readiness for the next morning. There 
were two of us passengers, luxuriously ac- 
commodated at the stern ; while the luggage 
was piled amidships, and a good-natured 
Englishman forward united in his own per- 
son (like a more distinguished navigator) 
" the midshipmite and the bo'sun tight, and 
the crew of the captain's gig." As we 
swept into the rapid current, the line of red- 
coats might have been seen in the distance 
marching toward the camp, and the strains 
of " Grandfather's Clock " still floated over 
the fields. 



142 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

From Ross to the Severn, the Wye has a 
nearly uniform width of about fifty yards. 
It is a swift river, vexed here and there 
with rapids ; and the task of the oarsman is 
rather to keep in the true channel than to 
spend strength in pulling. The return is 
so much more diffcult than the descent, that 
the boats are generally carted back the 
greater part of the way. Leaving the hills 
of Ross, we floated for a while between 
broad and pleasant meadows. A week of 
delicious weather had succeeded a month of 
incessant rain, and with the generous warmth 
and sunshine the whole country seemed to 
wake to joyous life. The haymakers were 
busy at their long-deferred task. The air 
was loaded with fragrance, and musical with 
the song of birds, the swish of the scythe, 
and the distant slumberous sound of mow- 
ing-machines. The contented kine stood 
belly-deep in the river under the willows. 
The foliage, though it was past midsummer, 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 143 

was as brilliant and fresh as we see it at 
home in early June ; and the tender green 
of the wheat-fields was speckled with mil- 
lions of scarlet poppies. Fleecy clouds tem- 
pered the rays of the sun. Over the whole 
smiling landscape, hung the pale soft haze 
which belongs to the English summer. 

There is nothing in America comparable 
to these delicate rustic scenes. With us the 
thrifty farmer strips his acres bare of trees, 
divides the small fields with hideous rail- 
fences, and leaves the scarred hillsides to 
parch and brown in the August heats. 
There is a cruel glare upon the shadeless 
roads. The horses' feet sink deep in the 
fine dust ; the hot cloud which rises behind 
the passing buggy settles down over the 
dirty grass and disfigured bushes of the way- 
side. Man — I mean the American man — 
meddles with the natural beauty of the 
country, only to spoil it ; and there is often 
something indescribably harsh in the rural 



144 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

scenery, even of the oldest and best-culti- 
vated parts of the States, such, for instance, 
as the neat and thriving towns of New Eng- 
land. In Old England nature has been 
treated with a much gentler and more care- 
ful hand. Almost everywhere, in this part 
of the island, the corn-fields and pastures 
are adorned with clusters of superb trees, 
the close hedgerows are neatly trimmed, the 
smooth macadamized highways are shaded 
like a private avenue, a broad foot-path runs 
beside the road, brick and stone walls are 
hung with ivy, and the laborer's cottage is 
bowered in roses. You might walk all day 
on an English country road, and fancy you 
were strolling through a nobleman's estate. 

A few miles below Ross the river makes a 
sharp turn ; the right bank suddenly becomes 
high and precipitous ; and among the trees, 
which cover the hills from the waterside to 
the summit, appear the towers and battle- 
ments of a dark stone castle. This is Good- 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 145 

rich Court, — not a relic of feudal times, but 
a modern copy of the military architecture 
of the fourteenth century, — a freak of the 
late distinguished antiquary, Sir Samuel 
Rush Meyrick, in whose lifetime the Court 
contained an unrivalled collection of ancient 
armor. But only a little way below Good- 
rich Court, on the point of a difficult cliff, 
stand the picturesque remains of Goodrich 
Castle, older, it is said, than the Norman 
Conquest, and still showing in the keep a 
portion of the Saxon walls. 

You may land here, and climb to the ruins ; 
and, after you have paid a sixpence to a tidy 
and handsome old woman who keeps the 
gate, you may roam at will over the grassy 
interior. A good part of the masonry is yet 
strong ; the fine arched gateway of the prin- 
cipal entrance is almost entire ; the ground- 
plan is easily traced in its completeness ; and 
the disposition of many of the upper rooms 
is sufficiently indicated by the remains of 



146 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

walls, and the corbels and beam-holes. The 
castle, indeed, never fell into decay ; but it 
was dismantled during the Civil War, after 
it had resisted the Parliamentary forces for 
nearly six weeks. It was almost the last 
stronghold of the Cavaliers. It is rather sur- 
prising to find how ample was the number of 
the dungeons, some of which may still be 
explored: but there was a reason for these 
subterranean accommodations; for we read 
that Lord Talbot, who owned the castle in 
the fourteenth century, "obtained a license 
from King Edward III. to have a prison 
here," and he earned a very pretty income 
by squeezing ransoms out of his French cap- 
tives. It is not of knights and of sieges, 
however, that we think the most as we sit 
under the great trees which have grown up 
in the ruins ; for it was here, in the courtyard 
of Goodrich Castle, that Wordsworth met 
the little girl whose artless answers are com- 
memorated in the poem " We are Seven." 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 147 

One of the greatest charms of the river 
scenery for the next few miles lies in the 
sudden and frequent change from the rugged 
to the soft. As we passed Goodrich we 
seemed to be jabout running ashore at the 
foot of a long and steep ridge, which raised 
itself high across our course. The slope — 
if any thing so steep can be called a slope — 
disclosed a beautiful alternation of forest and 
orchard, tilled fields, meadows, and trim gar- 
dens ; and dotted over the landscape were the 
cottages of a little hamlet. A bend in the 
river, not visible until we were close upon it, 
brought us around the point of the ridge and 
into the midst of rough and lofty rocks, 
which reminded me a little of the Palisades 
of the Hudson. There is a precipitous 
height called Symond's Yat, where the stream 
describes an elongated horse-shoe of about 
four miles in order to get around a promon- 
tory which is only three-quarters of a mile 
across ; and here it is customary for the able- 



148 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

bodied tourist to scale the hill, and meet his 
boat on the other side. A panorama of sur- 
prising extent and fairness rewards the labor. 

We rested for an hour at a little waterside 
inn, lunching on bread and cheese and home- 
brewed ale ; and in an hour more, after 
shooting through a rocky pass, crossing a 
deep mountain pool, skirting the great forest 
of Dean, floating under the shadow of groves 
of firs, and below rude cliffs, where legends 
placed King Arthur's Cave, we came to the 
opening of the Valley of the Monnow on the 
right; and there, in the cleft of the river, 
nestles the compact little town of Mon- 
mouth. 

There is not much to detain the tourist in 
this ancient place, where John of Gaunt had 
his favorite residence, and Henry V. was 
born, and where Capt. Fluellen doubtless 
discoursed of " the disciplines of the Roman 
wars, look you." Most of its historic relics 
have disappeared, and the modern town is 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 149 

not attractive. There is a mighty hill on the 
other side of the river, where a promenade 
has been laid out, and a " naval temple " 
erected to the honor of the " noble British 
Admirals " who have served their country in 
various realms and ages. Monmouth is almost 
Welsh ; and there is surely a touch of Welsh 
pride in this dedication, which leaves for 
more plebeian towns to celebrate the prowess 
of the British admirals who were not nobles, 
and the noble sailors who were less than ad- 
mirals. 

The voyage lasted until late in the after- 
noon, and there was some novel delight at 
every turn. On a round hill near the bank 
stood a tall May-pole, where the time-honored 
merry-making (which an act of Parliament 
once declared, apropos of the May-pole in 
the Strand, to be "a last relic of vile hea- 
thenism ") is still annually observed. A few 
paces from the opposite bank, half hidden in 
vines and trees, we saw the prettiest imagina- 



150 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

ble Gothic cottage in the most alluring of 
landscapes. I forget whether there were 
roses clambering over the walls, but it seems 
to me that the whole place was full of sweet 
scent and brilliant color. Men and women 
were tossing the hay in a strip of meadow 
between the house and the river. A lady 
was walking among them, while several dogs 
frisked around her. As our boat floated from 
under the trees, a comical Scotch terrier — 
surely the busiest body in all the land about 
— detached himself from the group, and 
came down to the brink in high excitement 
to examine and report. The examination was 
conducted with one ear erect, a foot lifted, 
and a fragment of red tongue exhibited at 
the corner of the mouth : the report to head- 
quarters was then made in great haste and 
with evidences of entire self-approval. . The 
banks became more mountainous, the course 
of the river more tortuous than ever. Instead 
of the boats of the salmon-fishers, which we 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 151 

had passed from time to time all day, we be- 
gan to meet occasional stranded coal-sloops; 
and the appearance of a streak of mud along 
the shore gave notice of tide-water. A little 
while before sunset we entered a wide amphi- 
theatre ; and there, on a plateau about twenty 
feet above the stream, was Tintern Abbey. 

We stepped ashore at a little causeway 
behind a little cluster of cottages, and walked 
to a little stone inn which faces the abbey 
church. Hung with ivy, and set in a rose- 
garden, it is one of the most fascinating 
hostelries that ever welcomed a traveller. 
Perhaps at that moment it offered rather 
less quiet and comfort than one might have 
wished ; for a very hungry excursion-party, 
whose vans were waiting in the stable-yard, 
swarmed all over it, while another party 
occupied the ruins. In this latter band, 
there was an old lady apparently much de- 
pressed by the iniquities of popery ; and, as 
she poked into cell and sacristy, her head 



152 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON TIIE WYE. 

shook incessantly in disapproval of the 
whole monastic system. I think she was 
looking for dungeons. At last she called 
her husband, and with evident agitation 
pointed to a little recess ; having looked at 
which, the pair walked straight out of the 
abbey, and came back no more. I went to 
see what they had found. It was a closet, 
furnished with a contemporary iron gate, of 
the area-railing pattern ; and the gardener 
uses it for locking up his wheelbarrow. 

When the vans had rolled away, we had 
the inn and the ruins to ourselves. We ate 
a cosey dinner by the open Avindow, where 
the flowers were nodding to us ; we climbed 
a hill to look at the magnificent windows of 
the abbey in the fading sunset ; and we 
slept in a pleasant upper chamber whence a 
daintily bowered staircase on the outside of 
the house led down into the garden. The 
early morning found us again under the 
arches of the church; and before visitors 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 153 

began to arrive we had taken leave of the 
cheerful landlady, and resumed our journey. 
I shall not attempt to describe Tintern, 
which so many have described before me. 
The beauty of the abbey church is not 
only in the splendor of its architecture, and 
the solidity of the noble walls which stand 
almost entire after a lapse of more than 
Leven hundred years : to understand the 
effect which this ruin excites, we must take 
into account the beautiful background 
against which the picture is displayed, the 
wooded hills around, the wide grassy plat- 
form, the swift river a few paces away. The 
student of architecture sets a high value 
upon the well-preserved remains, which ex- 
hibit so much of the best work of the twelfth 
century; the antiquary is deeply interested 
in tracing the plan of the monastic build- 
ings. We can see the line of the cloisters 
and the scriptorium, the chapter-house be- 
side the church, the sacristy close to the 



154 A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 

high altar, the monks' refectory with one 
window opening into the almonry and an- 
other into the kitchen, and the noble hall, 
with a row of columns down the centre, 
where travellers were hospitably entertained. 
A gateway is standing, through whose broad 
arches led the main entrance from the river ; 
and over it are the remains of some rooms 
which may have been the cells of the breth- 
ren. There are very few old abbeys in Eng- 
land whose internal arrangements can be so 
clearly discerned. Even the names of buried 
abbots may be read on the pavements of the 
cloisters. Deep in the forest, and yet mid- 
way on the route between the two important 
fortresses of Monmouth and Chepstow, the 
solitude of Tintern must often have been 
broken by the passing of military pageants, 
and belated knights clattering at the gates 
must have disturbed the chant in the choir. 

From Tintern to the estuary of the Severn, 
the Wye is a river of enormous tides, and 



A BOAT-VOYAGE ON THE WYE. 155 

consequently of slimy and unlovely borders. 

The conclusion of the journey was made by 

carriage, a delightful drive of little more 

than an hour, along romantic roads carried 

up the side of the steep river-hills to a height 

of about five hundred feet. There is a walk 

across a culminating ridge called the Wynd- 

cliff, about two hundred feet higher. At the 

top a surprise awaits you. For you seemed 

to be in the solitude of a remote forest ; but 

from the summit a view suddenly opens 

across the tops of the opposite hills, and 

there is the Severn running parallel with the 

Wye, only two or three miles away, and 

steamers are puffing on its broad waters. 

Chepstow is visible near the junction of the 

two streams. There, after a visit to the 

huge eleventh-century castle, the traveller 

will betake himself once more to railways 

and other modern discomforts. 




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